Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts: an astonishing skill and robust intelligence. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance.

Richard Yates stands today as America's finest realistic novelist

Yates is a realist par excellence. Read and weep

The most perceptive author of the twentieth century...A magnificent writer

One of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century

Every good writer I know acknowledges Yates as a master

An enjoyable Welsh outing, by turns brutish and funny

His customary strengths are in place. The stories are very funny in their black, often cartoonish way. There's also a degree of zest to the storytelling

Customary wit, flair and energy

All the elements of Welsh's best work remain in tact here: the brilliant imagination, the phonetically-transcribed Scots dialect, the humour, the gritty realism

What's striking about these early stories is that the thicker Welsh was steeped in the primordial goo of his Edinburgh Scots phonetics, the better the storytelling got

As you would expect, the stories in this collection involve a certain amount of cultural tourism to the lower depths, undertaken with black humour... Welsh's relish for degradation covers up a strong sentimental streak

Welsh's transcription of Scots dialect is brilliant... Welsh also has a fabulous sense of the absurd... The overall vibe of these stories is dark and grim. And fierily, fiercely funny