Scope and Contents

The theme of this novel is a parody of the making of a British prime minister modeled after Margaret Thatcher. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This is the first American edition.The Guardian Ocober 5, 2007 Christopher Tayler: Not so long ago, it sometimes seemed as though the age's master plot revolved around a sexual encounter that caused at least one of its participants to be hauled up before a tribunal. Bill Clinton was this scenario's Exhibit A, of course, but his troubles only strengthened a fascination that started to grip writers at around the time of David Mamet's Oleanna (1992). By 2001, JM Coetzee, Philip Roth, Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen and many other novelists had inadvertently made the shamed professor a stock figure in heavyweight fiction.Post Bin Laden, post Bush, different characters have proliferated. Terrorists and traumatised New Yorkers have flourished, but the prevailing figure is almost certainly the horrified western intellectual trying, and usually failing, to sort out his or her responses to the carnage on the world stage. These characters have come in a range of varieties, from glassily...

Scope and Contents

This story in this book deals with lesbian love and sexual bondage. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This volume actually contains 14 short stories, or as Gray writes, "This book contains more tales than ten so the title is a tall tale too, I would spoil my book if I shortened it, spoil the title if I made it true." Each page that is numbered in its upper outside corner is accompanied by a brief caption of the title of the story on the left sided page and the subject on the right sided page, e.g., 22 Houses And Small Labour Parties, 23 A Willing Young Worker, 24 Houses And Small Labour Parties, and 25 The Appearance of Authority, etc. A section at the end of the book provides notes on the background of each story. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents The dust jacket depicts a naked self portrait of Gray and a muse that appears to be Morag McAlpine, his wife. The Sackners met them in Glasgow in 2004. Kirkus Reviews stated: "A most curious collection of semiautobiographical stories, from the veteran Scots author (the Whitbread-winner Poor Things, 1993; etc.) and graphic artist. The tales feature different protagonists and narrators, but the dominant one is a long-married (sometimes divorced) male approaching old age, taking stock of his (disappointing) life, and drawing resentful contrasts between vigorous youth and enfeebled age. There are terse, flimsy vignettes like "Pillow Talk," which portrays a husband trying to goad his wife into leaving him; a memory of "failures of common decency" that blighted a schoolboy's childhood ("Sinkings"); and a description of a peace march ("15 February 2003") that's only an excuse for lambasting Bush-and-Blair's Iraq policies. Several stories address the volume's themes more directly, and...