Unlikely Stories, Mostly is the first collection of short stories by Alasdair Gray, published in 1983.
Publishing history.
"Unlikely Stories, Mostly" was released as a Canongate hardback in 1983; an erratum slip was inserted into the first edition that read "This slip has been inserted by mistake."
A Penguin Books paperback was issued in 1984. "Five Letters from an Eastern Empire" was issued as a stand-alone work in 1995 as part of Penguin's Penguin 60s series.
A revised edition with the extra stories "A Unique Case" and "Inches in a Column" in thirteenth and fourteenth place, and a new postscript by Douglas Gifford, was released in 2010. "Logopandocy" is retitled "Sir Thomas's Logopandocy", and "Prometheus" as "M. Pollard's Prometheus" in this edition. In 2012 the entire work was included in Gray's collection "Every Short Story 1951–2012".
Summary.
Like Gray's best-known work "", the book was published in the 1980s but contains work going back thirty years.
Critical responses.
Writing in the "London Review of Books", Daniel Eilon contrasted the variable quality and experimental nature of the first seven stories with the next five, which he called the "real achievement of this work", and the final two shorter pieces. While suggesting the collection could have benefited from some editing out of weaker material, he described "Logopandocy" as "an extraordinary feat of imaginative insight." Theo Tait, in "The Guardian", wrote that "Unlikely Stories, Mostly" is Gray's best short-story collection, and is influenced by Kafka, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson's "Rasselas". He considered "Five Letters From An Eastern Empire" to be the highlight of the collection. In the "Financial Times", Angel Gurria-Quintana compared Gray's illustrations with those of William Blake. Gray used his epigram "Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation" in the book.
Dave Langford reviewed "Unlikely Stories, Mostly" for "White Dwarf" #55, calling it "an uneven but excellent collection of fantasies and parables, mostly."
"Unlikely Stories, Mostly" won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983.
References.
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