Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)

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I wish I could make you like death a little more. It’s a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into farce, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life.” a b c d Gray, Alasdair (1981). Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-84767-374-9 . Retrieved 27 July 2017. Visit & Learn > Explore Parliament > About The Building > Parliamentary Buildings > Canongate Buildings > Canongate Wall > quotations". Scottish Parliament . Retrieved 5 November 2020. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?"

Dallas first worked with Gray in 2008 when she was running her commercial gallery, but she had long been aware of his work as both writer and artist and of how it “permeated through the West End of Glasgow, an area I’ve lived most of my adult life”. She would see occasional snatched glimpses through tenement windows of paintings by him, and there were more public works to view, such as his celebrated murals in The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant.Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". [1] Lanark won the inaugural Saltire Society Book of the Year award in 1982, and was also named Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. [2] The book, still his best known, has since become a cult classic. In 2008, The Guardian heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction." [3] Plot summary [ edit ]

Alasdair Gray died at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital on 29 December 2019, the day after his 85th birthday, following a short illness. He left his body to science and there was no funeral. [99] If it's woman trouble," said the man, "I can advise you because I was married once. I had a wife who did terrible things, things I cannae mention in the presence of a wean. You see, woman are different from us. They're seventy-five per cent water. You can read that in Pavlov."

Gray, Alasdair (19 September 2008). "Alasdair Gray gives his reaction to reading his life in print". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2020. Sayers, Louise (13 January 2015). "Surge for Herald during referendum". BBC News . Retrieved 12 January 2020.

a b c Fleischer, Evan (26 August 2015). "How Alasdair Gray Reimagined Glasgow". New Yorker. Archived from the original on 20 September 2017 . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Even at the height of his literary and artistic success (in the autumn of 2010 there were two Gray exhibitions showing in Edinburgh at the same time), Gray feared poverty. “I am a well-known writer who cannot make a living from his writing,” he would say. Despite the status of Lanark, its sales never equalled its reputation. Gray came to fiction late, publishing his first novel Lanark at the age of 46 in 1981. A experimental, pornographic fantasy – 1982, Janine – followed three years later, with his rambunctious reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poor Things, appearing in 1992. As his literary reputation increased, winning both the Guardian fiction prize and the Whitbread novel award in 1992, the elaborate illustrations he created for his books began to draw attention to the pictorial art Gray had been producing all along. The stream of commissions for murals and portraits gradually increased, and he finished his career as one of Scotland’s most admired and versatile artists.Sunday Herald editor: "It's not a two fingers to Westminster. Independence is about how we go forward as a country" ". The Saint. 3 June 2014 . Retrieved 12 January 2020.