Gray is a genius, a born storyteller whether at a visionary or a more down-to-earth level even the poorest of the stories contains something intriguing or funny. You'll find opening lines such as 'I met Jesus Christ only once …' and closing lines such as: 'Whatever the future of the human race it is not likely to dispense with dentists.' In this book you'll also find exotic fables, humorous sketches, pastiche, political diatribes, anecdotes, doodles, scraps of conversation. One of the six volumes anthologised here, Ten Tall Tales and True, advertises its contents as including social realism, sexual comedy, science fiction and satire. It ends with a couple of downbeat snapshots of old men struggling with illness and drink in the 21st century. It starts with a short HG Wells-style fantasy about a star falling into a tenement backyard, published by Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1951, when Gray was 17. The book illustrates the vast range of his writing – and, it must be said, its sometimes very uneven quality. Gray's collected short stories come in at an overwhelming 900 pages, in a handsome quasi-Edwardian hardback designed by the author, and illustrated with his distinctive frontispieces, mocked-up woodcuts, heraldic emblems, totemic symbols and line portraits of strong women. The most accessible of his major novels, Poor Things, published in 1992, is a historical pastiche, a Victorian reworking of the Frankenstein story. 1982, Janine, which the author himself regards as his best work, is a lurid sado-masochistic fantasy, punctuated with political rants, which takes place inside the head of a drunken Scottish Tory all this is set against another beautifully rendered realistic narrative, about the protagonist's sentimental education. It is now thought of as probably the classic Scottish novel of the late 20th century – a book which dramatised the hollowing out of the Empire's second city and helped make the recent flowering of Scots literature possible. Lanark, conceived as an epic of postwar Scotland, is a Kafkaesque/Orwellian dystopia wrapped around a naturalistic portrait of the artist as a young man in 1940s and 50s Glasgow. Gray's two best-known novels, Lanark and 1982, Janine, are hybrids in which realism is echoed and amplified by wilder and more experimental forms. On the evidence of Every Short Story 1951-2012, we could slap a few more tags on to this bewilderingly varied talent: Glasgow's Borges, perhaps, or Scotland's VS Pritchett. T he novelist, playwright, poet, muralist, illustrator, pamphleteer and literary historian Alasdair Gray has been called all sorts of things: the 20th century's William Blake, Glasgow's Piranesi, 'the greatest Scottish novelist since Walter Scott' (by Anthony Burgess), 'a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision' (by Will Self), a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters.

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