Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Wickedly Good
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!

Troubling but mostly brilliant

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.

Bizarre, Wonderful, Visionary - A Very Fun Read
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.
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Product Description
Ten stories, told in different voices, by the author of Poor Things, touch upon such themes as the train of the future, a portrait of old age, and a child deciding whether to be male or female. 15,000 first printing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Intelligent stories -- very Gray
This volume (which contains more than ten short stories, by the way) feels like a younger cousin to his earlier Unlikely Stories Mostly.Gray create intelligent stories that are sometimes odd, sometimes enigmatic, often subtle, and occasionally quite over the top.If you're familiar with Gray, this book continues in the spirit of his other work.

If you're not familiar with Gray, you should know that Gray writes, illustrates, and lays out his own books.He treats the book as a single physical artifact by paying attention to issues like pagination, layout, and integration of covers and title pages into the artistic whole of the book.If you like that kind of thing, he's worth looking at.If you like contemporary authors like William Gass or John Gardner, give him a try.For most readers Gray needs some easing into, and I would recommend you start with this book or Unlikely Stories Mostly. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection brings together some of Alasdair Gray's best plays. This exciting work includes the unabridged scripts of four of his most famous dramas: The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1967) and Mavis Belfridge (1968) are both set in the '60s, the former a fable and the later a true tale. McGrotty and Ludmilla (1975), a political pantomime and 'the Modern Aladdin'; and Working Legs (1997), 'A Play for PeopleWithout Them'. These are combined with four one-actsexual comedies written in the '60s and '70s; The Loss of Golden Silence, Dialogue, Homeward Bound and Sand Lang and Miss Watson. Plus an intriguing glimpse at the, as yet unmade, Lanark movie with sections of the originalstoryboard. ... Read more

Product Description
The novelist Alasdair Gray was once known as a playwright. In 2007, he began writing a modern verse translation of Goethe's "Tragedy of Faust", and after the first act found the Devil lead the hero into a twenty-first century Goethe never imagined. This required a change of names, so the play is now "Fleck", a comedy. ... Read more

Product Description
Illustrated throughout with the author's own eccentric drawings, there are tales of love and loss as the body, ungracefully ages: stories of mischievous, old men and effective messages from Gray himself, proving he is not at the 'end of his tether'. ... Read more

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A lecturer cornered in an embarrassing menage a trois, a Glaswegian Cinderella and an extremely talkative dentist all feature in this brilliant and original collection of tall tales from Alasdair Gray, author of "Lanark", "Poor Things" and "The Book of Prefaces". Bringing together social realism, sexual comedy, science fiction and satire, "Ten Tales Tall and True" proves that truth is indeed much stranger than fiction. ... Read more

Product Description
The loves and lives of June, Senga and Donalda are told in this book which covers the period 1963 to 1990. Also featured are unhappy children, a liberal headmistress, a tobacconist's family, a commercial traveller, a lighthouse keeper and a pimp. From the author of "Lanark". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Something Leather
Alasdair Gray is an interesting an unique voice... This is a fun little book, but best to find one with his illustrations.He is at his best when he uses his art and words together.Try to find one of the British editions.

Raves for Gray's leather-and-bondage Bildungsroman
It bewilders me that such a fine piece of work should drop out of print so quickly, while so much that's mediocre or worse gains a wide audience and many reprints.This comic and satirical novel is written in a neo-picaresque chain-of-stories form, and is a fine companion to Gray's prizewinning _Poor_Things_. Gray himself credits the inimitable Kathy Acker for the inspiration to write it.You'll never look at a woman in leather in the same way again. The nominal epilogue--really an essential part of the structure--may be the funniest part. ... Read more

Product Description
Kelvin Walker is in London to make his fortune. He plans to start at the top and through his absurd ambition a megalomania surfaces that is unrelieved by his insensitive and ruthless attempts at friendship and romance. Yet is he all bad? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

the fall of kelvin Walker
easy to understand, I read it in one day ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of four verse sequences describing 31 years of "a life" from 1952 to 1983. Alasdair Gray is also author of "Lanark, a Life in 4 Books", "Saltire Self-Portrait 4, Alasdair Gray" and "The Fall of Kelvin Walker, a Fable of the Sixties". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The problem of life after death in an unusual way
If we are tempted to lead another life after death,if light is an essential part in our existence,if we want to see the possible range of human degradation we should read "Lanark"and think it over. ... Read more

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Originally published in 1992 and now available in a revised edition, a political book which suggests that Scottish independence matters and that only one party is working to achieve it. ... Read more

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Published to collide with the General Election, this pamphlet is for anyone alarmed by the present British government of every nation in the British islands. It argues that each one of them can only become a democracy by becoming a republic. It shows how the Westminster Parliament has largely abandoned responsibility for the doings of those legal, security and welfare offices collectively known as the Crown. It is a passionate argument for responsible government, democracy and freedom. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of stories that describe painful kinds of education, the title story describing how an uninhibited woman educates a prim Scottish lecturer. ... Read more