Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Alasdair Gray
Available as Paperback, eBook
The first short story collection from the irreplaceable Alasdair Gray, sublimely decorated throughout
A man finds a bald patch on the back of his head that looks curiously like a face, then discovers he’s splitting in two. A bored student suggests digging a tunnel into the foundations of the art school. An elderly man is healed by hundreds of tiny people working on repairs inside his own head.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly is Alasdair Gray’s first collection of short stories. Gloriously illustrated, darkly funny, and steeped in myth and fable, they capture Gray’s singular imagination.
“Unsettling, otherworldly … Not since William Blake has a British artist wed pictorial and literary talent to such powerful effect”
financial Times
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“His work is masterly … Temperamental radicalism, militant humanism and a number of recurring sexual, linguistic and aesthetic themes are woven together into a prose full of recondite allusions and brilliant innovations”
london Review Of Books
“As you’d expect from a writer as talented as Gray, there are enough idiosyncratic pleasures knocking around to make the book well worth reading”
independent
“A series of fantastical fables, showing the influence of Kafka, Swift and Johnson’s Rasselas … Memorable”
guardian
“A necessary genius”
Ali Smith
Alasdair Gray
Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from the Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures. In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.