The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories [Paperback]

Alasdair Gray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 2005

Fans of the work of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, and T. Coraghessan Boyle will revel in Alasdair Gray's masterful, witty collection. Gray's stories defy genre, and his angular, playful style, prodigious wit, and razor-sharp intellect are matched by his remarkable skill with the short-story form. In "Job's Skin Game," the narrator humbly tells his life story like the evenings news. During a moment of awkward revelation, he shares the strangely exquisite pleasure he receives from scratching at the skin condition he's developed since losing his two sons in the Twin Towers tragedy and a small fortune in the dot-com meltdown. In "Big Pockets with Button Flaps," a wily old man teases and taunts a pair of punk teenage girls as their confrontation takes on social implication through lightning-fast transfers of power and wit. The Ends of Our Tethers is vintage Gray—accessible, experimental, mischievous, wide ranging, beautifully written, and wise.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gray, the Scottish author of the novels Lanark and the Whitbread-winning Poor Things, among others, returns to the form he first visited in Unlikely Stories, Mostly with a collection filled with wry and mordant humor. In these 13 stories, Gray dances across many of the discontents of modern life, but lingers at the divides of gender and age. Set mainly in Glasgow during the present day, the talesâ€"many so short they're more like sharp, eccentric sketchesâ€"feature characters and narrators who observe their world with a mixture of wistfulness and disappointment. "Big Pockets with Button Flaps" opens with a pair of teenage girls trading banter with an old man with odd, semisexual proclivities and closes with a series of reversals in situation and power. In "No Bluebeard," a man recounts his three failed marriages and the unexpected surrender that led to a successful fourth ("It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is"). In "Miss Kincaid's Autumn," a brother and sister live together far more harmoniously than most married couples, while "Aiblins" centers on the frustrating interactions between an established poet and the young, half-crazed upstart who may or may not be the genius he claims to be. This is a book with a sneaky, cumulative power; the prose is as spare and provocative as the illustrations of leering demon skulls and sly young women drawn by Gray himself.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Accosted by teen thugs, a man "no longer young" seems in for it; then "the smaller, more dangerous-looking youth" recognizes his old teacher; though safe, the man "smiles rather wistfully at the tall youth's combat trousers." Another man shelters a strange young woman fleeing her family; tolerating her profound peculiarities because she's good in bed, he eventually marries her, after which she refuses to sleep with him; he sifts through his three previous marriages for a clue to what it is about him. An author teaching creative writing meets an eccentric young poet who spurns all coaching and then disappears, only to resurface, beaten-looking, years later, demanding that the writer get his original manuscript published, even if under the writer's name; more years pass, and the poet shows up again, yet more decrepit--has the writer's refusal to help driven him insane? At least two persons seem to have reached tether's end in each of the amusingly distressing new stories by the author of the modern Scots classic Lanark (1981). Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S. (January 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841956260
• ISBN-13: 978-1841956268
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,339,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre, Wonderful, Visionary - A Very Fun Read, November 28, 2007

By 

Richard Millions (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (Paperback)

I was introduced to this work by Madison Smartt Bell when he read "15 February 2003" to a creative writing class a few years ago. I was very intrigued and bought the book shortly after. The short stories in this book are both visionary and hilarious. Gray has a beautiful ability to capture a deep sense of truth from minor details and quietly bizarre circumstances. He gets into some very deep psychological territory with stories such as "Aiblins," where the author himself meets a fictionalized version of himself as a young man, and "Job's Skin Game" where a man who is coping with eczema engages in quaint and grotesque skin peeling rituals. His stories are immediately engaging, very fun and easy to read though often presented in esoteric forms.

I read Poor Things a year or so after this book and liked it FAR less. That book, although a good yarn, seemed trite next to this book. It seemed a bit gimmicky; the tricks that Gray uses throughout that book were fun but didn't leave a lasting impression.
In "Ends of our Tethers" Alasdair Gray achieves a beautiful harmony between postmodern mashup of style and deep, true characters. "Sinkings" and "No Bluebeard" are stories that are presented almost as lists. The first being three brief scenarios where the narrator was emotionally damaged and insulted by the people around him, the second is a male narrator recounting the tale of his various ruined marriages, the wives referred to simply as FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD.


My favorite of these stories are those that add a touch of the surreal. "Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps" and "15 February 2003" seem to take place in a future dystopia. The narrators of these stories are filled with an existential kind of despair.
I can't recommend this book enough. Sometimes visionary sometimes just interesting and enjoyable. Gray's illustrations also add to the experience of this book. The leering skulls seem both friendly and evil.

5.0 out of 5 stars Wickedly Good, October 16, 2009

By 

lucysnow "lucysnow1851" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (Paperback)

I'm halfway through The Ends of Our Tethers and am trying to stop reading so fast. Please keep this book in stock! The stories are brilliant with hilarious endings. My favorite story so far is "Moral Philosophy Exam" which is very funny and ends with a multiple choice exam. "No Bluebeard" is the most memorable, a story about a man's four failing marriages. I can't describe in words how much I'm enjoying this book. "Job's Skin Game" had me both cringing and laughing uncontrollably. Perfect!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Troubling but mostly brilliant, November 10, 2008

By 

ignis "Shadrach" (Northern Indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (Paperback)

This is an excellent, hilarious and often disturbing collection of short stories. My one criticism is that the penultimate story, an account of a protest against the Iraq war, is so tonally different from the other pieces that it rings false. The other stories have an almost Beckett-like abstraction and eternal quality, the penultimate story has already dated.