The State Is Your Enemy: Essays on Liberation and Racial Justice

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Incendiary and heartrending, the sixteen essays in The State Is the Enemy lay bare government brutality against the working class, immigrants, asylum-seekers, ethnic minorities, and all who are deemed of a lower order. Drawing parallels between atrocities committed against the Kurds by the Turkish State, and the racist police brutality, and government sanctioned murders in the UK, James Kelman shatters the myth of Western exceptionalism,revealing the universality of terror campaigns levied against the most vulnerable, and calling on a global citizenship to stand in solidarity with victims of oppression. Kelmans case against the Turkish and British governments is not just a litany of murders, or an impassioned pleait is a cool-headed take down of the State and an essential primer for revolutionaries.

Reviews

"James Kelman changed my life."
--Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

"Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period."
--The Times

"Kelman has the knack, maybe more than anyone since Joyce, of fixing in his writing the lyricism of ordinary people's speech ... Pure aesthete, undaunted democrat--somehow Kelman manages to reconcile his two halves."
--Esquire (London)

"The greatest British novelist of our time."
--Sunday Herald

"A true original ... A real artist ... it's now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be ranked alongside [Kelman] without ironic eyebrows being raised."
--Irvine Welsh, Guardian

"A writer of world stature, a 21st century Modern."
--The Scotsman

"The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren't supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that's when it's safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they're not going to come round and tell you you're talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing."
--James Meek, London Review of Books

"The greatest living British novelist."
--Amit Chaudhuri, author of A New World

"What an enviably, devilishly wonderful writer is James Kelman."
--John Hawkes, author of The Blood Oranges

Author Bio

James Kelman was born in Glasgow, June 1946, and left school in 1961. He travelled and worked various jobs, and while living in London began to write. In 1994 he won the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late. His novel A Disaffection, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. His 2008 novel Kieron Smith, Boy won the Saltire Society's Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. He lives in Glasgow with his wife Marie, who has supported his work since 1969.