Author Description

From the ghostly and unlikely, to pungent social realism, and from the comfortable to the challenging, whether rural or urban, supernatural or true-to-life, this anthology shows the vitality of the Scottish short story. The collection includes such wonderful traditional tales as 'The Wee Bannock'. It contains household names such as Sir Walter Scott, the pioneer of the modern literary story, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The Kailyard School is usually excluded from anthologies of this kind; but there are stories here by J. M. Barrie, Ian MacLaren, and S. R. Crockett, as well as work by writers as varied as John Davidson, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Eric Linklater, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray, and James Kelman. Younger writers are strongly represented; among them such talents as Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy.. The selection reveals a series of remarkable contrasts between urban and rural, demotic Scots vernacular and elegant English prose, the sentimental and the critical, the supernatural and the realistic. With an informative introductory essay by Douglas Dunn, the book presents a superb selection of the best of Scottish writing.