The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories
by Alasdair Gray
from Canongate U.S.
1982, Janine (Canongate Classics)
by Alasdair Gray
from Canongate U.S.
Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer (British Literature Series)
by Alasdair Gray
from Dalkey Archive Press
The full title of this work, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, reflect a bit of wacky genius at work here. Someone named Alasdair Gray has found a memoir supposedly of a 19th-century public health officer in Glasgow. The truth of the memoir is suspect, nevertheless Gray manages to change it and then lose it. And that's just the backdrop. Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless, an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter who takes a suicide victim, gives her the brain of her unborn child to create a promiscuous and brutal girlfriend. The book, which won the 1992 Guardian Fiction Prize, takes off from there.
POOR THINGS revises the story of FRANKENSTEIN by replacing the traditional "monster" with Bella Baxter--a young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of a child. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, POOR THINGS is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking contrast between the ambition of men and the knowledge of women.
The Ends of Our Tethers
by Alasdair Gray
from Canongate Books Ltd
Lanark (Canongate Classics)
by Alasdair Gray
from Canongate Books Ltd
Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (Harvest Book)
by Alasdair Gray
from Harcourt
Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)
by Alasdair Gray
from Canongate U.S.
Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (Penguin 60s)
The Book of Prefaces
from Bloomsbury USA
The preface usually contains one of four pleasures, says anthologist Alasdair Gray. There is the biographical snippet, full of gossipy details that "make us feel at home in earlier times." There is the author's attempt to forestall criticism (in first editions) or to answer it (in later ones). There is the report on the state of civilization, both favorable (see Walt Whitman) and unfavorable (see Karl Marx). And there is the attack on other writers or translators, sometimes bridging centuries and containing spears thrown at the long dead. All four pleasures are well represented in this 640-page treasury of English and American intros, which runs from an A.D. 675 translation of Genesis to the 1920 poems of Wilfred Owen. Why stop there? "The flow is stopped at 1920," admits Gray in his own disarmingly self-effacing preface, "by costs of using work still in copyright."
This is anything but anthology-on-the-cheap, however. Gray (Lanark and A History Maker) poured 16 years of research into The Book of Prefaces, and adds considerable value with his own running commentary, which straggles down the margins in brash red ink. Gray on the God of Genesis: "This God, with revenge in mind, first makes earth ugly as hell." Among God's anthologized fellows are Mark Twain, who defends his use of Southern dialect in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Lewis Carroll, who anticipates his critics' charges of writing nonsense in The Hunting of the Snark and proceeds to prove their case; and Charles Darwin, who recalls how the seeds of The Origin of Species were sown aboard the HMS Beagle. Gray mixes scholarly research with playful eccentricities: When was the last time you saw a book's typesetter, typist, and publisher memorialized in pen-and-ink drawings? And "with this in their lavatory," writes the cheeky author, "everyone else can read nothing but newspaper supplements and still seem educated." He may be right. --Claire Dederer
Remember all the times you skipped the preface thinking you would get back to it, and never did? Here is an opportunity to read nothing but prefaces, and you'll be delighted to find what fun you've been missing.
A unique work of literature which will amuse, amaze and inform both casual browsers and students, The Anthology of Prefaces is a work of monumental scholarship and idiosyncratic passion. It is the result of a lifetime's reading, prodigious research and years of creative labor from Scotland's grand old man of letters. Alasdair Gray has chosen and edited all of the prefaces presented in this impressive volume and has included commentary by some thirty other authors including James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy, and Virginia Woolf. The Anthology of Prefaces offers an unusual and unprecedented look at literature, a treat for any reader.
A History Maker
by Alasdair Gray
from Harcourt
In the 23rd century, the Public Eye, a television-like device that lets everyone see what everyone else is doing, has turned warfare into a spectator sport. One of particular interest involves the Scottish border regions' fight with the English. Wat Dryhope, leader of the Ettrick clan, pretends to surrender his clan's standard during a climactic battle, only to resume attack and win a draw. The trick gives him heroic standing and revolutionizes the rules of battle, setting off a global change in human combat. Though he seeks a more peaceful existence for his people, Dryhope's performance in warfare makes him the "history maker" of the novel's title.
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