Ten Tales Tall & True - Softcover

Gray, Alasdair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156001969 ISBN 13: 9780156001960

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1995

Synopsis

Gray serves up a dazzling mixture of social realism, sexual comedy,science fiction, and satire here. A New York Times Notabale Book of the Year, this is a "highly imaginative" (Newark Star-Ledger) collection of stories from "one of the sprightliest and wittiest of living prose writers" (San Francisco Chronicle). Illustrated by the Author.

About this title

About the Author:

Alasdair Gray (born 28 December 1934) is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years. It is now regarded as a classic, and was described by The Guardian as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction." His novel Poor Things (1992) won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Gray's works combine elements of realism, fantasy, and science fiction, plus clever use of typography and his own illustrations. He has also written on politics, in support of socialism and Scottish independence, and on the history of English literature. He has been described by author Will Self as "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" and as "a great writer, perhaps the greatest living in this archipelago today", and by himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian".

From Kirkus Reviews:

In this collection of (in fact) more than ten stories noted Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (Poor Things, 1993) again displays both his artistic talents--the illustrations are his own--and his sometimes quirky, but always original storytelling gifts. Many of these stories have previously appeared in British journals like The Independent and The Glasgow Herald; with a few exceptions, the most notable being a deceptively quiet horror story of rail travel in the future (``Near the Driver''), they are set in present-day Scotland. For Gray, the region is as different from England as Faulkner's Mississippi is from the rest of the US. It's a hard place of implacable pieties, rigid class structures, and an undercurrent of resentment of Tories, Toffs, and Thatcherites. But Gray is too much the artist to limit himself to bitter polemics. Humor and empathy are his preferred tools. In ``Houses and Small Labor Parties,'' the youngest member of a crew of unskilled workers poignantly confronts the realities of class and aging when he agrees to work with old Joe one Sunday on the boss's garden. An older woman who ``has no pity for men and enjoys destroying them, especially smart manipulators,'' woos her lover back because she doesn't want ``to be lonely'' (``Homeward Bound''); at a wedding, a young Glasgow woman, who deliberately dressed down knowing that her best dress would look cheap beside the English groom's relatives, is taken up and then dropped by a smug Englishman far too obsessed with the ragged jeans she wears (``You''); and a married woman, searching for her long lost faith, reads her Bible in a local pub, the only quiet place she can find, but is evicted because ``we cannot have a woman weeping in the corner of the bar. It spoils people's pleasure'' (``Are You A Lesbian?''). A remarkably unpretentious mix of wit and wisdom infused with a palpable delight in telling stories that will never turn stale. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & Company
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0156001969
• ISBN 13: 9780156001960
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Sterling Diane