Alasdair Gray - The Ends of Our Tethers

PROPERTY is based on what happened in Argyllshire to the sons of my friend Bernadette Logie.

15 FEBRUARY 2003 is based on a Herald article published on 17 February 2003.

WELLBEING was the last chapter of a political pamphlet, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland , Canongate, Edinburgh 1997.

CREATIVE WRITING was the title of a 13th story which I discarded as too facetious. It contained three jokes I will inflict upon you here —

FICTION EXERCISE

When three years old I saw my parents killed in a road accident and decided never again to love anything else that can bleed.

Use the preceding sentence to start a short story or novel .

BOOK REVIEW EXERCISE

Queneau’s Le Chiendant explores the existential consequences of radical changes of epistemological perspective.

Without loss of intelligibility rewrite the preceding sentence using the word paradigm.

LOGIC EXERCISE

Query: Which is the odd man out?

Tiny Tim

Little Nell

Wee Willie Winky

Moby Dick

(Remember that one of them is female)

GOODBYE

“ If Gray wrote his Genesis in the novel Lanark, and even if he has since concentrated on apocrypha, this is his magnificent Book of Job.”

“ It’s seven years since Gray last offered up any new fiction, and he has been missed … [he] has a style all of his own .”

“ Consummate, joyful and teasing talent — his knowingness pre-empts criticism with a constant celebration of complexity and contradiction .”

“ One of Britain’s finest experimental short-story writers … He is demanding, but ultimately rewarding and individualistic .”

“ His fiction is continually peeling back the skin of narrative conventions and human motivations .”

Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian who (despite two recent years as Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University) has mainly lived by writing and designing eighteen books, most of them fiction. THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS is the ninth published by Canongate.