Every Short Story ― From 1951 to 2012

Now in paperback, an authoritative collection of Alasdair Gray's stories gathered over the last 25 years, with illustrations and information to amuse the curious reader

The first 16 stories in this collection were published in 1983 with the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly. The Washington Post called it "a wonder of ingenuity, a varied and rich collection in which Gray's abilities as a visual artist and illustrator are placed not only beside but within the products of his fertile imagination as a writer." The Bookseller said "Gray's is an extravagant imagination." This collection also has 57 tales from later books, and 16 new ones published here together for the first time. This last section, Tales Droll and Plausible, shows that Gray's recent 21st century fiction is as uncomfortably funny and up-to-date as his earliest.

Alasdair Gray is the author of 1982, Janine; The Book of Prefaces; Old Men in Love; and Poor Things; for which he won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. His first novel, the loosely autobiographical, blackly fantastical Lanark, changed the landscape of British fiction, opening up the imaginative territory inhabited today by writers such as A. L. Kennedy, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh. It led Anthony Burgess to hail him as "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott."