Every Short Story: 1951-2012

Alasdair Gray is the author of "1982, Janine"; "The Book of Prefaces"; "Old Men in Love"; and "Poor Things"; for which he won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. His first novel, the loosely autobiographical, blackly fantastical "Lanark," changed the landscape of British fiction, opening up the imaginative territory inhabited today by writers such as A. L. Kennedy, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh. It led Anthony Burgess to hail him as "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott."