The Ends of Our Tethers (13 page)

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.