Follow the rebirth of Scottish literature from one of the finest current English writers. The Good Times is a humorous and dazzling collection of short stories that continues a tradition of portraying ordinary people dealing with their everyday lives. These twenty first-person narratives introduce an assortment of men encountering life and love in their immediate surroundings and in the world at large.

These 35 short stories--most published in this country for the first time--bring to mind, "at various moments, such diverse masterpieces . . . as James Joyce's "Dubliners" . . . and the parables of Kafka" ("The Village Voice").

One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse: his girlfriend disappears, the police question him for a crime they won't name, and his stab at disability compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare bureaucracy. Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish working class, this is a dark and subtly political...

James Kelman's newest comprehensive guide and reference source is an excellent way to study the history of banking & finance. Beginning with the earliest forms of banking in Mesopotamia and Greece and covering the more recent banking crises of the 20th & 21st Centuries, this easy-to-read guide will help you better understand the role that banking and global finances play in our lives.