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Irvine Welsh was born and raised in Edinburgh. His first novel, Trainspotting, has sold over one million copies in the UK and was adapted into an era-defining film. He has written twelve further novels, including Crime and the number one bestseller Dead Men's Trousers, four books of shorter fiction and numerous plays and screenplays. Irvine Welsh currently lives between London, Edinburgh and Miami.
A collection of 21 stories and one novella - Welsh's second book, but his first published stateside - that will inevitably be compared to last year's Booker winner, James Kelman. The Scottish dialect, the urban lowlife characters, and the vulgar slang all make a similar claim to authenticity. Welsh's punters prowl the streets of Edinburgh, not Kelman's Glasgow, a distinction likely to be lost on most American readers. In any case, not all of his mean and grungy stories rely on a thick Scottish brogue, though a number of casual pieces are one-joke gimmicks. In the sci-fi-ish Vat '96, a head is kept alive in a jar while his wife entertains men in his presence; for Where the Debris Meets the Sea, four Hollywood glamour girls sit poolside and comment on the bodies of working-class men. Such simple reversal is at the center of the title story, in which a newborn and a teenaged acid head exchange bodies in a freak lightning storm. Welsh's best stories, including the novella, A Smart Cunt, are mostly days-in-the-lives of aimless, drug-addled fellows who live for sex, football, and violence (often in combination). In Eurotrash, the narrator goes to Amsterdam to kick his habit, and has an affair with a repulsive and ugly woman who turns out to be a transsexual. Granny's Old Junk packs a clever punch when it's revealed that the little old lady who's about to be ripped off by her junky grandson is a longtime user herself. Such brutal ironies come easily to Welsh, as does a nihilism that seems designed for effect. In The Last Resort on the Adriatic, a ten-year grieving widower joins his wife in a shipside suicide; and the video-obsessed drudge in Snuff, having seen every film in his guide, records his own suicide on videotape. Welsh often settles for shock value, sleazy sex, and heroin chic, but he's actually a better writer than many who've been here before, especially Burroughs and his epigones. (Kirkus Reviews)
