“As Yorgos Lanthimos’ film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel POOR THINGS has received not only rave reviews but numerous accolades, including four Oscars, it’s the perfect time to look at the source material. This is not a comparison between the two but rather a chance to give those who don’t know the novel an idea of what to expect, and of what makes it exceptional.”
Mazin Saleem’s Ode to Alasdair Gray’s Lesser-Known, Equally Deserving Books, Including a Gargantuan Retelling of the History of English Literature & a Bowdlerization of The Divine Comedy
The Woefully Neglected (and Partially Unfilmable) Creations of Alasdair Gray
“Novels narrated in the first-person or in the third- can have those choices rendered cinematically […]. But Gray used endnotes, illustrations, typography, plagiarism, self-reference, and the layout of the page to further his plots, to deepen his diegesis, and to make us laugh.”
The latest issue of Books From Scotland is online – featuring
The Kavya Prize
Clairmont
Queering the Greek Myths
Ava Anna Ada
Kevin the Orange
Who’s Aldo?
Green New Worlds
The Hotel Hokusai
James Clerk Maxwell
Café Canna
10 Scotland Street
The Bumblebee Garden
Poor Things
The Salt & the Flame
Sleekit
To the Dogs
“The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the Glaswegian Alasdair Gray. […] Like watching Lanthimos’s gorgeous spectacle, reading Gray is a wild & unsettling ride. His work is full of progressive imagination, wry impropriety & intricate literary form.”
Discover Alasdair Gray – the radical Scottish polymath & author of POOR THINGS
“There is a great deal of ambiguous truth-telling in POOR THINGS and many conflicting narratives. Poor Things: A Novel Guide explores these contradictions and unmasks the city, people, places, and politics of Poor Things which makes the novel so distinctly ‘Gray’ and a uniquely Glasgow story.”