Alasdair Gray Short Stories

 I had my sister send into Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution Alasdair Gray's The End of Our Tethers. This was the only book rejected by the person in charge of the prison's interlibrary loan program. The story of how it took a year for the book to get in after I requested it from my sister is in my journal and also my write up of the collection. Meanwhile, I was working my way through the Guardian's Alasdair Gray collection when I saw Theo Tait's Every Short Story 1951-2012 by Alasdair Gray - review. The total number of stories is 900. That's a lot more than were in End of Our Tethers.

This paragraph does not surprise me even though I have read only one novel and one short story colelction of Gray's:

Gray is a genius, a born storyteller whether at a visionary or a more down-to-earth level; even the poorest of the stories contains something intriguing or funny. But he's also a chancer and a bodger, given to cobbling together short stories from bottom-drawer leftovers. The incidental pleasures of Gray's books include the author's own commentaries – "critic fuel", he sometimes calls them. The endnote here, a brief critical autobiography (itself rehashed), is typically and charmingly open about his occasional need to rush a book into print in order to pay off debts or fund some other grand project.

And of that one collection, the reviewer said this:

The penultimate volume, 2003's The Ends of Our Tethers, "shows the high jinks of many folk in the last stages of physical, moral and social decrepitude – a sure tonic for the young" (according to Gray's original blurb, sadly lost here). It's an uncharacteristically muted collection, often mourning failed relationships. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise that a writer as excessive as Gray can also do something as restrained and classical as "Miss Kincaid's Autumn", but it was.... 

And my memory agrees with  the "mourning failed relationships." However, from what I have read of Gray, I would not pick up anything by him that I did not think of as an experiment. And experiments caqn go awry and I think with Gray the going awry will be part of the fun.