by Janice Galloway
|
by Iain Banks
|
by Robert Crawford
|
by Kevin MacNeil
|
by Irvine Welsh
|
See buying choices for this item to see if it's one of the millions that are eligible for Amazon Prime.
|
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
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.
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
See all Editorial Reviews
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.
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
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence:
A MILD SEPTEMBER MORNING. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
skin game Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fifteenth February, Human Resources, Luke Aiblins, The Long Town, Antique Nebula, Big Sam, Newton Mearns, New York, The Coven, The Red Fox, Tony Blair, Wee Chrissie New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
A MILD SEPTEMBER MORNING. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
skin game Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fifteenth February, Human Resources, Luke Aiblins, The Long Town, Antique Nebula, Big Sam, Newton Mearns, New York, The Coven, The Red Fox, Tony Blair, Wee Chrissie New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 9
books:
See all 9 books this book cites
2
books
cite this book:
- Why Not? by Shari Low on page 126
- New Writing 2 (v. 2) by Malcolm Bradbury in Back Matter
- In His Own Write by John Lennon on page 141
- The Labour Party: A Centenary History by Brian Brivati on page 149
- World as Will & Idea (Everyman's Library (Paper)) by Arthur Schopenhauer on page 130
See all 9 books this book cites
- Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 95) (Internationale Forschungen ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) by Rui Carvalho Homem on page 370
- Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion (Scroll 4) (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) by Gavin Miller in Front Matter
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
74% buy the item featured on this page: The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories |
 |
26% buy Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer (British Literature Series) $11.48 |
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
|||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
 |
Customer Discussions
Beta (What's this?)
New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.
|
This product's forum
(0 discussions)
Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Active discussions in related forums
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Listmania!
Look for Similar Items by Category
Shop Tool Storage in Home Improvement |
Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free |
|||||||||
|
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
You have no recently viewed items or searches.
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session. |
Continue shopping: Top Sellers
| ||||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
