Originally released in the USA in 1935, Tom Kromer's incredible novel of the Great Depression is now re-published in a beautiful new edition featuring an introductory essay by Duncan McLean.

This publication is a limited special-edition printed pamphlet, written and produced in summer 2020 as an artistic response to recent events in America, and across the world. Each letterpress pamphlet is individually bound and numbered.

These stories move from Mull's windswept beaches to the darkened backroom of a Glasgow strip club, from night-time on snow-covered slopes to the claustrophobia of a bizarre bus journey, but what develops through the differences in setting and style is a shared commitment to local culture and language, to warm humour, and most of all, to listening for the characters to emerge and express themselves within the text.

In the early 2000s, not long after graduating from Art School, Stuart Murray was conscripted to attend a 'Gateway to Work' course, as part of the New Deal workfare programme which was introduced by Tony Blair's first New Labour government. Almost fifteen years later, aided by extensive notes made at the time, this book documents that experience in both words and pictures.

“Stuart Murray has produced over 40 drawings which seek to capture a sense of random encounters with the dispossessed – beggars, junkies, prostitutes, the starving, alcoholics…. The strength of the book is its cumulative effect, the way in which a progression of anonymous characters seem to become increasingly familiar as you increasingly recognise your own encounters. Slowly, as you turn the pages, you begin to realise that in fact the subject of the book is not only (perhaps not mainly) the dispossessed it portrays. In large part, you are the subject of the book. You and your ability to forget these encounters, to fail to see the people portrayed as you scurry by to your train. Your ability to dispossess the dispossessed of one of the few things they had left – their role in our identity.” - Robin McAlpine, Scottish Left Review, Apr/May ’06 issue