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Scottish Stories
A beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics collection of stories by great Scottish writers from the past two centuries ranging from Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, and Leila Aboulela, and many more.
Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from an entrancingly literary land. Scotland is known for its centuries of colorful Celtic folklore and its long tradition of spine-tingling ghost stories, as well as for fiction that revels in the gorgeous landscapes of the Highlands and the Western Isles and the rich histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from an entrancingly literary land. Scotland is known for its centuries of colorful Celtic folklore and its long tradition of spine-tingling ghost stories, as well as for fiction that revels in the gorgeous landscapes of the Highlands and the Western Isles and the rich histories of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
480 pages, Hardcover
First published April 4, 2023
11 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Gerard Carruthers
40 books4 followersGerard Carruthers holds the Francis Hutcheson Chair of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.
He is General Editor of the Oxford University Press Edition of the Works of Robert Burns and has published fifteen books and over one hundred academic articles and essays. He works on literature from the 1690s to the 20th century, with particular interests in the long eighteenth-century in Scotland, textual editing and book history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
He is General Editor of the Oxford University Press Edition of the Works of Robert Burns and has published fifteen books and over one hundred academic articles and essays. He works on literature from the 1690s to the 20th century, with particular interests in the long eighteenth-century in Scotland, textual editing and book history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 28, 2023
Incredibly, I'm apparently the only person to log this book on Goodreads, so I'm obligated to review it. This is a great collection which I enjoyed immersing myself in throughout December, soaking up each rich, glutinous story like a hunk of bread on a sauce-laden plate.
This is a nicely collated selection of stories by Scottish writers, beginning with the likes of Hogg and Stevenson and ending in modern day stories from Ali Smith and Andrew O'Hagan. Selection must have been incredibly difficult, and as such there are some notable omissions (Douglas Stuart and Joanna Bailie don't make appearances). This is balanced out by the inclusion of some incredible lesser known Scottish literature which I had never even encountered in my degree - D.K. Haynes' 'Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch' is a particularly valuable inclusion, as is Margaret Oliphant's 'The Open Door'.
As well as this, this collection manages to, in spite of spanning centuries, tell us a story about Scottish literature itself; from the downright obsession with the supernatural and occult in the 18th and 19th centuries (sometimes verging into despicable outright racism, as is the case in Arthur Conan Doyle's offering here), to the more modern pastiches of everyday life-as-drama (Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A.L. Kennedy, Leila Aboulela) with some darkly tragicomic magical realism for some good measure (Alasdair Grey, Irvine Welsh).
It's worth every penny, and is also beautifully presented with a lovely hardback edition. Heartily recommended by me!
This is a nicely collated selection of stories by Scottish writers, beginning with the likes of Hogg and Stevenson and ending in modern day stories from Ali Smith and Andrew O'Hagan. Selection must have been incredibly difficult, and as such there are some notable omissions (Douglas Stuart and Joanna Bailie don't make appearances). This is balanced out by the inclusion of some incredible lesser known Scottish literature which I had never even encountered in my degree - D.K. Haynes' 'Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch' is a particularly valuable inclusion, as is Margaret Oliphant's 'The Open Door'.
As well as this, this collection manages to, in spite of spanning centuries, tell us a story about Scottish literature itself; from the downright obsession with the supernatural and occult in the 18th and 19th centuries (sometimes verging into despicable outright racism, as is the case in Arthur Conan Doyle's offering here), to the more modern pastiches of everyday life-as-drama (Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A.L. Kennedy, Leila Aboulela) with some darkly tragicomic magical realism for some good measure (Alasdair Grey, Irvine Welsh).
It's worth every penny, and is also beautifully presented with a lovely hardback edition. Heartily recommended by me!
May 6, 2024
either Scottish culture and history is just entirely stereotypes or this selection of short stories was compiled by a genius. (or probably a little of both) Read this before a trip to Scotland and proceeded to annoy my family with multiple moments of ~! HEY I READ A STORY ABOUT THAT. fun times
July 15, 2023
When I read short story collections, I’m usually hoping to encounter stories that both challenge and entertain. With this collection of ‘Scottish stories’, I suppose I hoped also to get a stronger feel for the land and for the culture(s) of the people living there. These stories are all well-written, and, as seems to be consistent with the imprint (Everyman Pocket Classics), the book is a physical pleasure to read - attractively bound, heavy enough but not too heavy, font a good size, and with adequate margins. But I can’t say there’s much celebration of the Scottish landscape in these stories, and collectively they have some strange obsessions. I can’t tell whether those themes reveal something characteristic about Scottish culture or are just idiosyncrasies of the editor, Gerard Carruthers. His short preface does indicate he consciously selected pieces to reflect a diversity of geography, race, gender, and sexual orientation among recent Scottish writers.
The oddities: between a third to a half of the stories involve ghosts, more or less. Also, there’s a running theme of common, rural, or working people being ignorant and narrow-minded, while anyone who is really self-reflective almost inevitably finds themselves at odds with their family or society around them. For certain, Carruthers’ sense of humor is tuned differently than mine. I found a few of the stories funny - especially Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘Smeddum’, about a farm woman who does as she thinks best for and despite her children - but others that Carruthers describes as ‘side-splittingly funny’ just seemed to me appalling and relentlessly bleak, including Irvine Welsh, ‘The Granton Star Cause’, about a young man’s life falling apart. Carruthers sees John Galt, ‘The Gudewife’, as funny and perhaps proto-feminist; I read it as a pretty bitter takedown of a strong female character. The Arthur Conan Doyle selection, ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, uses the real-life inspiration of the Marie Celeste as fodder for a doubly racist adventure story that manages to include both a black supervillain who hates all white people and a whole tribe of African savages turned docile by a weird animist artifact. Surely there were better options from Conan Doyle, though this perhaps this offers an honest reflection of racism in Scottish culture in the British Imperial era.
Overall, I found the collection more challenging than straight-forwardly entertaining, though I’m glad to have read it. That said, I actively enjoyed: Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door’, a gothic ghost story; Gibbon, ‘Smeddum’; Eric Linklater, ‘Sealskin Trousers’, a selkie story; George Mackey Brown, ‘The Drowned Rose’, another lyrical ghost story set on a remote island; William McIlvanney, ‘At the Bar’, a realist sketch of rudeness and recompense; Bernard MacLaverty, ‘The Clinic’, on diabetes testing; and Leila Aboulela, ‘The Museum’, a delicate and lovely exploration of the cultural gulfs between a young native Scot and a young foreigner in school together.
The oddities: between a third to a half of the stories involve ghosts, more or less. Also, there’s a running theme of common, rural, or working people being ignorant and narrow-minded, while anyone who is really self-reflective almost inevitably finds themselves at odds with their family or society around them. For certain, Carruthers’ sense of humor is tuned differently than mine. I found a few of the stories funny - especially Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘Smeddum’, about a farm woman who does as she thinks best for and despite her children - but others that Carruthers describes as ‘side-splittingly funny’ just seemed to me appalling and relentlessly bleak, including Irvine Welsh, ‘The Granton Star Cause’, about a young man’s life falling apart. Carruthers sees John Galt, ‘The Gudewife’, as funny and perhaps proto-feminist; I read it as a pretty bitter takedown of a strong female character. The Arthur Conan Doyle selection, ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, uses the real-life inspiration of the Marie Celeste as fodder for a doubly racist adventure story that manages to include both a black supervillain who hates all white people and a whole tribe of African savages turned docile by a weird animist artifact. Surely there were better options from Conan Doyle, though this perhaps this offers an honest reflection of racism in Scottish culture in the British Imperial era.
Overall, I found the collection more challenging than straight-forwardly entertaining, though I’m glad to have read it. That said, I actively enjoyed: Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door’, a gothic ghost story; Gibbon, ‘Smeddum’; Eric Linklater, ‘Sealskin Trousers’, a selkie story; George Mackey Brown, ‘The Drowned Rose’, another lyrical ghost story set on a remote island; William McIlvanney, ‘At the Bar’, a realist sketch of rudeness and recompense; Bernard MacLaverty, ‘The Clinic’, on diabetes testing; and Leila Aboulela, ‘The Museum’, a delicate and lovely exploration of the cultural gulfs between a young native Scot and a young foreigner in school together.
June 8, 2025
High highs and low lows in this collection. Regardless of whether I personally enjoyed all these stories though, I do believe the editor compiled a wide range of perspectives throughout Scottish history, which I think was the main point of the collection. My favorites were The Cameronian Preacher's Tale (James Hogg), Thrawn Janet (Robert Louis Stevenson), The Clinic (Bernard MacLaverty), Old Mortality (James Robertson), and At the Museum (Leila Aboulela).
April 26, 2025
Leans a little too heavily on contemporary fiction. Out of a rich centuries-long literary history, about a third of the stories selected were published in the last two decades, and they were the most hit or miss of the bunch.
On the whole though, a good and varied selection of themes and tones that contribute to a portrait of a place.
On the whole though, a good and varied selection of themes and tones that contribute to a portrait of a place.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews