In the superbly crafted and critically acclaimed You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free, James Kelman has created an unforgettable character and a darkly comic portrait of a post-9/11 America. Jeremiah Brown, a Scottish immigrant in his early thirties, has lived in the United States for twelve years. He has moved as many times, from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, all in the hope his luck would change. To add to his restlessness and indecision, he now has a nonrefundable ticket to Glasgow--by way of Seattle, Canada, Iceland, and England--to visit his mother. On his last night in the States, Jeremiah finds himself in a town south of Rapid City, moving from bar to bar, attracting and repelling strangers, losing count of the beers he has drunk. All the while he is haunted by memories and by an acute sense of foreboding.

“The effects of 9/11 ramify through a network of conduits and pathways, including the examples of expressive culture this volume explores; and the registration of those effects will likewise be felt in an array of documents and texts. The cultural, literary, and mass mediated effects of 9/11 encompass the globe and the chapters in this volume assume a transnational and international range of vantage points. The topics examined include the representation of Islam and Moslems in a number of texts and genres, the political and psychological dilemmas faced by characters in a number of literary works, and the refraction of current psycho-cultural-political tensions in forms of expressive culture in which the effects of 9/11 are felt in other than explicit ways. Was 9/11 a moment that punctuated and disrupted the movement of history or, as one of the authors suggests, did it act as a catalyst to escalate existing stereotypes? The chapters investigate not just different genres and cultural forms but distinct modes of intersection between the political, the cultural and the psychological. One achievement of this volume is to show how 9/11’s effects at times insinuate themselves in discourse through nuance and subtlety, and at other times frontally assault texts and images. In the words of one article, “modern Dutch post-9/11 novels directly participate in current cultural and political discourses.” By the same token, these cultural and political discourses participate in novels, films, TV shows, and the effects of 9/11 proliferate and concentrate in this exchange. This volume draws timely attention to the multiple forms of this complex interaction.” Dr Patrick Hagopian, University of Lancaster

One of the most powerful and provocative writers to have emerged in Britain in recent years, James Kelman has engendered a good deal of criticism over his use of 'bad' language. This text examines his work, exploring the social and political issues that he raises.

Consists of separately paged reports of bodies related to the Dept.