Acid Plaid: New Scottish Writing

by Harry Ritchie

Paperback, 1997

Status

Available

Call number

PR8644 .A27

Genres

Publication

Arcade Publishing (1997), Edition: 0, Paperback, 256 pages

Description

The phenomenal success of TRAINSPOTTING made Edinburgh the hottest literary spot on the map. The Scottish beats have infused their writing with a raw, youthful energy and daring that has attracted a wide audience. ACID PLAID includes stories by a host of explosively talented writers, many of whose work hits U.S. shores for the first time here.

Language

ISBN

1559703989 / 9781559703987

Local notes

24 contemporary Scottish writers are represented in this vivid, all-encompassing anthology, poets & essayists included, though most are fiction writers. Familiar names--such as Trainspotting's Irvine Welsh, The New Confession's William Boyd & Morvern Callar's Alan Warner--mingle with others who deserve to be better known in the US, among them Janice Galloway & A.L. Kennedy, both prize-winning novelists whose stories dispel any misperception here of the current surge in Scottish literature as a predominantly male phenomenon.

From Welsh's view in the vernacular of a soccer enthusiast, whose plans for watching the weekend match on TV are modified somewhat when his wife's legs are removed by a high-speed train as they cross the tracks while hurrying home from the pub ("A Fault on the Line'') to Kennedy's New York story of a young woman whose desert dreams & violent fantasies have no room in the "perfect'' relationship she's enmeshed in ("Rockaway & the Draw''), these are often tales of savagery, whether accidental or suppressed, blackly humorous or between-the-eyes serious.
The trademark images of punks & ravers made popular by the Scottish Beats are here as well. But as the anthology makes abundantly clear, these writers claiming Scottish kinship are onto something more universal, poking into the basics of the human condition in a way that makes for uncommonly good reading.
A memorable collection, with a crisply contextual introduction by Ritchie. -- a Kirkus Review

Physical description

256 p.; 7.8 inches

Pages

256
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