Opening The Heroism of Mortals is like opening a box of intellectual firecrackers. The stories ricochet between the comically absurd, the minutely observed, the inevitability of heartbreak. Cameron examines tiny details, using his prose as a microscope: simple acts become ominous and complex, entire universes are revealed. The Heroism of Mortals peers into the little details of our lives and studies their chaos and tragedy. A soldier in the red army wants to impress his girlfriend and sparks off a tragic series of events. A couple decide to have a day out and both their lives are changed forever - and a new art movement is born. The gift of a hat demonstrates man's humanity to man. From living statues to domestic abuse in leafy Kelvinside, this collection is endlessly inventive. Fictions unfold within fictions, stories tumble into one another, lives collide in unpredictable ways and all is executed with wry and dark humour. Cameron is playing, and with dangerous toys: politics,...

A work in three parts, Things Written starts with aphorisms in “How Not to Be a Ruminant", shifts to essays in “Weights and Counterweights", and concludes with poetry in “By the Metre". Some arguments appear in more than one section, and include nationalism, class, free will, religion, literature and the arts, but the theme of human relationships runs through the entire book, and is most closely examined with reference to Martin Buber's ideas in a long essay entitled “Cats and Dogs, and Other Things We Cannot Understand". “... there is ... in Cameron's work, a lingering spirituality, a faith that something soulful and significant is present in the everyday, in the ordinary 'heroism of mortals' he writes of. On occasion this takes the form of scepticism about science's claim to be able to quantify and explain all experience. Like the philosopher John Gray, he is dubious about 'progress', political, economic, and scientific. ... if Scottish literature has...

This collection of radical, now humorous now dark and pessimistic short stories was conceived as a whole, and some characters populate more than one story. Stylistically bold and varied, the book challenges the conformism that dominates so much witing in this consumerist age.

Admired by John Carey, Erich Hobsbawm and Terry Eagleton, this "deeply reflective, extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on language" attempts to look at the historical relationship between language, writing and knowledge. For the linguist and for the general public