Gray, Alasdair 1934–

(Alasdair James Gray)

PERSONAL: Born December 28, 1934, in Glasgow, Scotland; son of Alex Gray (a machine operator) and Amy (Fleming) Gray (a homemaker); children: Andrew. Education: Glasgow School of Art, diploma (design and printmaking), 1957. Politics: "Socialist. Supporter of Scottish Home Rule and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament." Religion: "Rational pantheism."

ADDRESSES: Home—2 Marchmont Terrace, Glasgow G12 9LT, Scotland. Agent—Giles Gordon, 6 Ann St., Edinburgh EH 4 1PJ, Scotland.

CAREER: Part-time art teacher in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, Scotland, 1958–62; theatrical scene painter in Glasgow, 1962–63; freelance playwright and painter in Glasgow, 1963–75; People's Palace (local history mu-seum), Glasgow, artist-recorder, 1976–77; University of Glasgow, writer-in-residence, 1977–79, professor of creative writing, 2001–; freelance painter and maker of books in Glasgow, 1979–2001.

MEMBER: Society of Authors, Glasgow Print Workshop, various organizations supporting trade unions and nuclear disarmament.

AWARDS, HONORS: Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship, 1957; Three grants from Scottish Arts Council, between 1968 and 1981; Booker Prize nomination, Book Trust (England), 1981, award from Saltire Society, 1982, and Niven Novel Award, all for Lanark: A Life in Four Books; award from Cheltenham Literary Festival, 1983, for Unlikely Stories, Mostly; award from Scottish branch of PEN, 1986; Whitbread Prize, and Guardian Fiction Prize, both 1992, both for Poor Things.

WRITINGS:

(And illustrator) Lanark: A Life in Four Books (novel), Harper (New York, NY), 1981, revised edition, Braziller (New York, NY), 1985.

(And illustrator) Unlikely Stories, Mostly (short stories; includes "The Star," "The Spread of Ian Nicol," and "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire"), Canongate Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1983, revised edition, Penguin (London, England), 1984.

1982 Janine (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1984, revised edition, Penguin (New York, NY), 1985.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties (novel; adapted from his television play of the same title; also see below), Canongate Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1985, Braziller (New York, NY), 1986.

(With James Kelman and Agnes Owens) Lean Tales (short-story anthology), J. Cape, (London, England), 1985.

Saltire Self-Portrait 4, Saltire Society Publications (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1988.

(And illustrator) McGrotty and Ludmilla; or, The Harbinger Report: A Romance of the Eighties, Dog and Bone Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1989.

(And illustrator) Old Negatives: Four Verse Sequences, J. Cape (London, England), 1989.

Something Leather (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1990.

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless, M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992.

Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, Canongate Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1992.

(And illustrator) Ten Tales Tall and True: Social Realism, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, and Satire, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1993.

(And illustrator) A History Maker, Canongate Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1994, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1996.

(And illustrator) Mavis Belfrage: A Romantic Novel with Five Shorter Tales, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1996.

The Artist in His World: Prints, 1986–1997 (poetry; prints by Ian McCulloch), Argyll (Gelndaruel, Argyll, Scotland), 1998.

(And illustrator) The Book of Prefaces, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2000.

Sixteen Occasional Poems, Morag McAlpine (Glasgow, Scotland), 2000.

A Short Survey of Classical Scottish Writing, Canongate Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2001.

The British Book of Popular Political Songs, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2002.

Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories, includes "Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps, Swan burial," and "No Bluebeard," Canongate Books (Edinburg, Scotland), 2003.

STAGE PLAYS

Dialogue (one-act; first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, at Gateway Theatre, 1971), Scottish Theatre (Kirknewton, Scotland), 1971.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker (two-act; adapted from his television play of the same title; also see below), first produced in Stirling, Scotland, at McRoberts Centre, University of Stirling, 1972.

The Loss of the Golden Silence (one-act), first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, at Pool Theatre, 1973.

Homeward Bound (one-act), first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, at Pool Theatre, 1973.

(With Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead) Tickly Mince (two-act), first produced in Glasgow, Scotland, at Tron Theatre, 1982.

(With Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, and James Kelman) The Pie of Damocles (two-act; also see below), first produced in Glasgow, Scotland, at Tron Theatre, 1983.

McGrotty and Ludmilla, first produced in Glasgow, Scotland, at Tron Theatre, 1987.

(And illustrator) Working Legs: A Play for People without Them (first produced by Birds of Paradise Company, 1998), Dog and Bone Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1997.

RADIO PLAYS

Quiet People, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1968.

The Night Off, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1969.

Thomas Muir of Huntershill, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1970.

The Loss of the Golden Silence, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1974.

McGrotty and Ludmilla, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1976.

The Vital Witness (documentary), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1979.

Near the Driver, translation into German by Berndt Rullkotter broadcast by Westdeutsche Rundfunk, 1983, original text broadcast by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1988.

TELEVISION PLAYS

The Fall of Kelvin Walker, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1968.

Dialogue, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1972.

Triangles, Granada, 1972.

The Man Who Knew about Electricity, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1973.

Honesty (educational documentary), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1974.

Today and Yesterday (series of three twenty-minute educational documentaries), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1975.

Beloved, Granada, 1976.

The Gadfly, Granada, 1977.

The Story of a Recluse, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1987.

OTHER

(Designer and illustrator) Wilma Paterson, Songs of Scotland, Mainstream, 1995.

Author and reader of Some Unlikely Stories (audiocassette), Canongate Audio, 1994, and Scenes from Lanark, Volume 1 (audiocassette), Canongate Audio, 1995.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A Life in Pictures: Paintings, Murals, and Graphic Work, for Canongate Books.

SIDELIGHTS: After more than twenty years as a painter, and a scriptwriter for radio and television, Alasdair Gray rose to literary prominence with the publication of several of his books in the 1980s. His works have been noted for their mixture of realistic social commentary and vivid fantasy augmented by the author's own evocative illustrations. Jonathan Baumbach wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Gray's work "has a verbal energy, an intensity of vision, that has been mostly missing from the English novel since D.H. Lawrence." David Lodge of the New Republic said that Gray "is that rather rare bird among contemporary British writers—a genuine experimentalist, transgressing the rules of formal English prose … boldly and imaginatively."

In his writing, Gray often draws upon his Scottish background, and he is regarded as a major force in the literature of his homeland. Author Anthony Burgess, for instance, said in the London Observer that he considered Gray the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott became popular in the early nineteenth century. Unlike Scott, who made his country a setting for historical romance, Gray focuses on contemporary Scotland where the industrial economy is deteriorating and many citizens fear that their social and economic destiny has been surrendered to England. Critics praised Gray for putting such themes as Scotland's decline and powerlessness into a larger context that any reader could appreciate. "Using Glasgow as his undeniable starting point," Douglas Gifford wrote in Studies in Scottish Literature, "Gray … transforms local and hitherto restricting images, which limited [other] novelists of real ability … into symbols of universal prophetic relevance." As noted above, Gray became prominent as a writer only after several years of working as an artist and illustrator. Gray traces his own literary and artistic development to the early years of his life, once explaining that "as soon as I could draw and tell stories, which was around the age of four or five, I spent a lot of time doing these or planning to do them. My parents were friendly to my childish efforts, as were most of my teachers, though they also told me I was unlikely to make a living by either of these jobs…. I was delighted to go to art school, because I was a maturer draftsman and painter than writer. My writings while at art school were attempts to prepare something I knew would take long to finish: though I didn't know how long."

Gray went on to say that although his first novel took years to complete, the story line of what would become his now acclaimed first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, had essentially been worked out in his mind by the time he was eighteen. A long and complex work that some reviewers considered partly autobiographical, Lanark opens in Unthank, an ugly, declining city explained in reviews as a comment on Glasgow and other Western industrial centers. As in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, citizens of Unthank are ruled by a domineering and intrusive bureaucracy. Lanark is a lonely young man unable to remember his past. Along with many of his fellow-citizens, he is plagued with "dragonhide," an insidious, scaly skin infection seen as symbolic of his emotional isolation. Cured of his affliction by doctors at a scientific institute below the surface of the Earth, Lanark realizes to his disgust that the staff is as arrogant and manipulative as the ruling elite on the surface. Before escaping from this underworld, Lanark has a vision in which he sees the life story of a young man who mysteriously resembles him—Duncan Thaw, an aspiring artist who lives in twentieth-century Glasgow.

Thaw's story, which comprises nearly half the book, is virtually a novel within a novel. It echoes the story of Lanark while displaying a markedly different literary technique. As William Boyd explained in the Times Literary Supplement, "The narration of Thaw's life turns out to be a brilliant and moving evocation of a talented and imaginative child growing up in working-class Glasgow. The style is limpid and classically elegant, the detail solidly documentary and in marked contrast to the fantastical and surrealistic accoutrements of the first 100 pages." Like Gray, Thaw attends art school in Glasgow, and, as with Lanark, Thaw's loneliness and isolation are expressed outwardly in a skin disease, eczema. With increasing desperation, Thaw seeks fulfillment in love and art, and his disappointment culminates in a violent outburst with tragic consequences. Boyd considered Thaw's story "a minor classic of the literature of adolescence," and Gifford likened it to James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. The last part of Gray's book focuses once more on Lanark, depicting his futile struggle to improve the world around him. Readers have often remarked on the various diseases the characters in Lanark's Unthank suffer from: dragonhide, mouths, twittering rigor, softs. When asked if these diseases had allegorical significance, Gray once commented: "Probably, but I came to that conclusion after, not before, I imagined and described them. And it would limit the reader's enjoyment and understanding of my stories to fix on one 'allegorical significance' and say 'This is it.'" While some critics felt Lanark to be hampered by its size and intricacy, it rapidly achieved critical recognition in Britain, and Burgess featured it in his book Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939—A Personal Choice, declaring, "It was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it."

Although Lanark rapidly achieved critical recognition in Britain, it was Gray's second novel, 1982 Janine, that was the first to be widely known in the United States. When asked why his work had finally attained critical notice in the United States, Gray once commented: "Lanark was the first novel I had published in the U.S.A., by Harper & Row in 1981. It was speedily remaindered, because Harper & Row classified it as science fiction, only sent it to sci-fi magazines for review, and the sci-fi reviewers were not amused…. I suppose my books have been published in the United States because they sold well in Britain, and were praised by authors of A Clockwork Orange [Anthony Burgess] and The History Man [Malcolm Bradbury]."

1982 Janine records the thoughts of Jock McLeish, a disappointed, middle-aged Scottish businessman, during a long night of heavy drinking. In his mind, Jock plays and replays fantasies in which he sexually tortures helpless women, and he gives names and identities to his victims, including Janine of the title. Burgess expressed the opinion of several reviewers when he wrote in the Observer that such material was offensive and unneeded. But admirers of the novel, such as Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times, felt that Jock's sexual fantasies were a valid metaphor for the character's own sense of helplessness. Jock, who rose to a managerial post from a working-class background, now hates himself because he is financially dependent on the ruling classes he once hoped to change. Eder observed that Jock's powerlessness is in its turn a metaphor for the subjugation of Scotland. Jock expounds on the sorry state of his homeland in the course of his drunken railings. Scotland's economy, he charges, has been starved in order to strengthen the country's political master, England; what is more, if war with the Soviet Union breaks out, Jock expects the English to use Scotland as a nuclear battlefield. As the novel ends, Jock resolves to quit his job and change his life for the better. Eder commended Gray for conveying a portrait of helplessness and the search for self-realization "in a flamboyantly comic narrator whose verbal blue streak is given depth by a winning impulse to self-discovery, and some alarming insight."

Gray's short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, is "if anything more idiosyncratic" than 1982 Janine, according to Jonathan Baumbach of the New York Times Book Review. Many reviewers praised the imaginativeness of the stories while acknowledging that the collec-tion, which includes work dating back to Gray's teenage years, is uneven in quality. Gary Marmorstein observed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, some of the stories are "slight but fun," including "The Star," in which a boy catches a star and swallows it, and "The Spread of Ian Nicol," in which a man slowly splits in two like a microbe reproducing itself. By contrast, "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire" is one of several more complex tales that received special praise. Set in the capital of a powerful empire, the story focuses on a talented poet. Gradually readers learn the source of the poet's artistic inspiration: the emperor murdered the boy's parents by razing the city in which they lived, then ordered him to write about the destruction. "The tone of the story remains under perfect control as it darkens and deepens," according to Adam Mar-Jones in the Times Literary Supplement, "until an apparently reckless comedy has become a cruel parable about power and meaning." While responding to a question about Lanark and the possible allegorical significance of its characters, Gray related an anecdote about the story "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire": "I wrote [the story] when [I was] writer-in-residence at Glasgow University. When I finished, it occurred to me that the Eastern Empire was an allegory of modern Britain viewed from Glasgow University by a writer-in-residence. A year ago I met someone just returned from Tokyo, who said he had heard a Chinese and a Japanese academic having an argument about my Eastern Empire story. The Chinese was quite sure the empire was meant to be China, the Japanese that it was Japan. My only knowledge of these lands is from a few color prints, Arthur Waley's translation of the novel Monkey [by Wu Ch'eng-en] and some translated poems."

Gray's third novel, The Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties, was inspired by personal experience. Still struggling to establish his career several years after his graduation from art school, Gray was tapped as the subject of a documentary by a successful friend at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Gray, who had been living on welfare, suddenly found himself treated to airline flights and limousine rides at the BBC's expense. In The Fall of Kelvin Walker the title character, a young Scotsman with a burning desire for power, has a similar chance to use the communications media to fulfill his wildest fantasies. Though Kelvin arrives in London with little besides self-confidence and a fast-talking manner, his persistence and good luck soon win him a national following as an interviewer on a television show. But in his pride and ambition, Walker forgets that he exercises such influence only at the whims of his corporate bosses, and when he displeases them, his fall from grace is as abrupt as his rise.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker, which Gray adapted from his 1968 teleplay of the same title ("I sent it to a [BBC] director I know. He gave it to a producer who liked it"), is shorter and less surrealistic than his previous novels. The Observer's Hermione Lee, though she stressed that Gray "is always worth attending to," felt that this novel "doesn't allow him the big scope he thrives on." By contrast, Larry McCaffery of the New York Times Book Review praised The Fall of Kelvin Walker for its "economy of means and exquisite control of detail." Gray "is now fully in command of his virtuoso abilities as a stylist and storyteller," McCaffery said, asserting that Gray's first four books—"each of which impresses in very different ways—indicate that he is emerging as the most vibrant and original new voice in English fiction."

As reviewers became familiar with Gray's work, they noticed several recurring features: illustrations by the author, typographical eccentricities, and an emphasis on the city of Glasgow. When asked about the illustrations, Gray explained a little about the process of creating this kind of manuscript: "The illustrations and cover designs of my books are not essential to them, being thought of after the text is complete. I add them because they make the book more enjoyable. The queer typography, in the three stories which use it, was devised in the act of writing, not added after, like sugar to porridge."

As Gray continued to write, critical reception of his work varied widely. Many reviewers acknowledged his genius in such works as Lanark, while books such as Something Leather and McGrotty and Ludmilla; or, The Harbinger Report: A Romance of the Eighties were criticized for lacking the intensity of his earlier work. Gray himself was remarkably candid about the quality and intent of some of these efforts. For example, he described McGrotty and Ludmilla; or, The Harbinger Report as an Aladdin story set in modern Whitehall, "with the hero a junior civil servant, wicked uncle Abanizir a senior one, and the magic lamp a secret government paper which gave whoever held it unlimited powers of blackmail." And works such as Something Leather, said Gerald Mangan in the Times Literary Supplement, placed Gray in "an unfortunate tradition in Scottish fiction, whereby novelists have tended to exhaust their inspiration in the effort of a single major achievement." That Lanark was a major achievement Mangan had no doubt. "Lanark is now so monumental a Scottish landmark," he wrote, "that few readers would have reproached him if a decade of silence had followed it." Instead, Gray brought out "a good deal of inferior material that had evidently subsidized or distracted him during the composition of his epic." A New York Times Book Review article by John Kenny Crane further explained the circumstances under which Gray composed Something Leather. According to Crane, a publisher had been pushing Gray for years to produce a new novel. Getting nowhere and needing money, Gray shuffled around in his rejected short-story manuscripts and came up with one about a conventional working woman in Glasgow who decides to shave off her hair and begin dressing in leather clothing. The publisher sent Gray a substantial advance, and the tale of the bald, leatherclad Glaswegian woman became his first chapter, "One for the Album." Other unpublished stories, unstaged plays, and early radio and TV scripts were also pressed into service and ultimately published as Something Leather. Crane commented in his review: "Gray, who has published some very creditable works of fiction, shamelessly admits to absolutely everything in his epilogue." Yet, the critic added, "Taken on their own, some of the interior chapters have artistry and merit. I particularly liked the reflections on war in one titled 'In the Boiler Room' and the comical friction caused by the divergent life styles of boarders in 'Quiet People.' As short stories, some are quite fine. I would recommend the reader take them as such, even though Mr. Gray insists they are part of a novel." And despite his own criticism of Something Leather, Mangan said that in the five stories that comprise the work, Gray's "prose is generally notable for its refusal of second-hand definitions; and it is not surprising to find, among other consolations, a divertingly cynical diatribe on Glasgow's current status as culture-capital."

With the publication of Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless, M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, purportedly edited by Gray, the author returns to form, suggested Philip Hensher in the Spectator, "after a rather sticky patch." The work drew comparisons to such authors as Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne, partly because of its eccentric humor and setting and partly because of Gray's skillful use of the traditions of Victorian novels, which, according to Barbara Hardy in the Times Literary Supplement, "embodied their liberal notions of providence and progress in realistic narratives which often surge into optimistic or melioristic visions on the last page."

Set in Glasgow during the 1880s, the novel is narrated by Archie McCandless, a young medical student, who befriends the eccentric Godwin Baxter, another medical student. Baxter has been experimenting on the body of a beautiful and pregnant young woman who committed suicide to escape her abusive husband, and has created "Bella" by transplanting the brain of the fetus into its mother's skull. Bella is sexually mature and wholly amoral, and McCandless wants to marry her. She, however, runs off with a wicked playboy whom she soon drives to insanity and death. A clever final twist produces a book that Hensher described as "a great deal more than entertaining only on finishing it. Then your strongest urge is to start reading it again."

Gray uses his visual and writing talents in Ten Tall Tales and True: Social Realism, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, and Satire. He illustrates the cover with ten animal tails, then showing each animal in its entirety within the covers. A critic for the Review of Contemporary Fiction asked: "Is Gray suggesting perhaps the fragmented and nonhuman character of our life when we do not exist in a state of wholeness?" Set in present-day Scotland, the stories explore human relationships with humor and feeling. "[Gray's] stories most often dramatize those symbioses of oppression in which people find just the right partner, family or group to dominate or be dominated by," wrote Ron Loewinsohn in the New York Times Book Review. Observed Christopher Bray in the Spectator, "Stories and characters like these ought to make you downcast, and they would, were it not for the pithy intensity with which Gray sketches things in."

Gray expresses his concern for modern society in A History Maker, a political allegory set in a twenty-third-century Scotland that seems reminiscent of more ancient times. Society has become matriarchal, and men have little to do but kill each other; their war games are televised as entertainment. "Gray's touch is light and wry, and there is enough strangeness in his future to whet conventional SF appetites. But there is no mistaking the relevance of his allegory to the situation of nation-states in today's uneasy post-Cold War peace," maintained a Village Voice Literary Supplement reviewer. A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that A History Maker succeeds on "all of its many levels" and is a fine work of social satire: "The wit is sharp, the social commentary on target and, most important, the quirky, arch-voiced storytelling is unfailingly entertaining."

The Book of Prefaces is an unusual volume, which took Gray years to compile and edit. It is, as the title suggests, a collection of what he considers the greatest prefaces in works of literature written in English. It begins with the seventh-century author Caedmon and progresses through the twentieth century. Michael Kerrigan in the Times Literary Supplement had mixed feelings about The Book of Prefaces; while crediting Gray with choosing "prefaces that motivate the reader to seek out in their entirety the works they introduce, and to ac-knowledge the alternative futures that past achievements have made," he criticized the book for adhering too closely to a "rigid and restrictive" selection of works, and called it "striking in its portentousness." A very different point of view was expressed by Peter Dollard in Library Journal who found The Book of Prefaces to be "a delightfully original, ironic, and humorous compilation," a genuine "work of literature" in its own right, thanks to the "fascinating and often idiosyncratic commentary" by Gray.

When Sam Phipps reviewed The Ends of our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories, for the Spectator, he remarked that Gray's first fiction in seven years "confirms that at the age of sixty-eight he is in rude, wry and irascible health, compellingly inventive and perceptive—and never afraid to send himself up. Indeed an ambivalent mood of defiance and self-ridicule runs through the collection, beginning with the jacket, which as always Gray has designed himself: a naked, athletic, bearded man bearing a close resemblance to the author." The entire collection is dedicated to Agnes Owens, an excellent although little-known Scottish author, and, in it, Gray's characters develop largely as what Irvine Welsh, reviewing the book for the Guardian, called "disappointed idealists, saddened by setbacks both political and personal, the latter usually of a romantic nature, and their progress charts more than the customary replacement of youthful idealism with the cynicism of old age." Welsh commented that Gray's "new collection of short stories contains almost everything we have come to associate with its author. The pages glow with keen and incisive wit, are stuffed with quirky and downright weird occurrences, while the philosophical ruminations make us pause for thought, and the sad, flawed, often cowardly, but ultimately humane and decent protagonists are back with a vengeance. Once again, the book is beautifully illustrated by the author's own hand, and in the appendix the critics are playfully baited in advance."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bernstein, Stephen, Alasdair Gray, Associated University Presses (Cranbury, NJ), 1999.

Burgess, Anthony, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939—A Personal Choice, Allison & Busby (London, England), 1984.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 41, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Crawford, R., and T. Naim, editors, The Arts of Alasdair Gray, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1991.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 194: British Novelists since 1960, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Moore, Phil, editor, Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and Bibliography, British Library (London, England), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1994, Gilbert Taylor, review of Ten Tales Tall and True: Social Realism, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, and Satire, p. 1180; October 1, 2000, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of The Book of Prefaces, p. 374.

Books, September, 1993, p. 9.

Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1984.

Daily Telegraph, August 30, 1992, Kate Chisholm, review of Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless, M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer; December 17, 1994, David Profumo, review of A History Maker; November 11, 1995, Candida Clark and Jason Thompson, review of A History Maker; January 18, 1997, Miranda France, interview with Alasdair Gray.

Guardian, September 2, 1992, Francis Spufford, interview with Alasdair Gray; June 18, 1998, Jonathan Jones, interview with Alasdair Gray; October 11, 2003, Irvine Welsh, review of The Ends of our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories, p. 26.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1994, review of Ten Tales Tall and True, p. 87; February 15, 1996, review of A History Maker, p. 247.

Library Journal, May 1, 1991, Francis Poole, review of Library Journal, p. 108; August, 2000, Peter Dollard, review of The Book of Prefaces, p. 102.

Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1984, Richard Eder, review of 1982 Janine.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 9, 1984, Gary Marmorstein, review of Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

New Republic, November 12, 1984.

New Statesman, November 25, 1994, p. 48.

New Statesman & Society, September 11, 1992, Christopher Harvie, review of Poor Things, p. 38; November 25, 1994, Boyd Tonkin, review of A History Maker, p. 48.

Newsweek, March 22, 1993, Malcolm Jones, Jr., review of Poor Things, p. 70.

New York, March 8, 1993, Rhoda Koenig, review of Poor Things, p. 84.

New Yorker, April 12, 1993, review of Poor Things, p. 121.

New York Review of Books, April 25, 1991.

New York Times Book Review, October 28, 1984, Jonathan Baumbach, review of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, p. 9; May 5, 1985; December 21, 1986, Larry McCaffery, review of The Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties, p. 7; August 4, 1991, John Kenny Crane, review of Something Leather, p. 15; March 28, 1993, review of Poor Things, p. 8; March 6, 1994, Ron Loewinsohn, review of Ten Tales Tall and True, p. 11; August 18, 1996, Nicholas Birns, review of A History Maker, p. 18.

Observer (London, England), April 15, 1984; March 31, 1985; September 27, 1994, p. 21; December 10, 1995, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, April 19, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Something Leather, p. 58; January 25, 1993, review of Poor Things, p. 78; January 31, 1994, review of Ten Tales Tall and True, p. 76; March 4, 1996, review of A History Maker, p. 61.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1994, Lynne Diamond-Nigh, review of Poor Things and Ten Tales Tall and True, p. 204.

Spectator, February 28, 1981; September 5, 1992; October 30, 1993, p. 35; October 18, 2003, Sam Phipps, review of The Ends of Our Tethers, p. 61.

Stage, November 30, 1972.

Studies in Scottish Literature, Volume 18, 1983, article by Douglas Gifford.

Sunday Times (London, Engalnd), December 11, 1994, Andro Linklater, review of A History Maker.

Times (London, England), April 1, 1986.

Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 1981; March 18, 1983; April 13, 1984; March 29, 1985; May 10, 1985; July 6-12, 1990, Gerald Mangan, "Lucrative Lines," p. 731; April 3, 1992; August 28, 1992; December 9, 1994, p. 22; August 11, 2000, Michael Kerrigan, review of A Book of Prefaces, p. 10.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, December, 1984; April, 1996, p. 8.

Washington Post Book World, December 16, 1984; August 31, 1986; June 16, 1991.

Whole Earth Review, December 22, 1995, James Donnely, review of Ten Tales Tall and True.