Alisdair Gray RIP

[Phil_A]

https://canongate.co.uk/news/alasdair-gray-author-and-artist-has-died-aged-85/

Just some more sadness to end this horrible year. Lanark was a foundational work for me, I'd say he was up there with Pynchon as one of the real literary geniuses of the last century.

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Read Lanark a few years back, found it quite peculiar but a fascinating piece of writing. Sad to hear about this.

[Danger Man]

I read Lanark in one very long sitting. Very few books have ever seemed so exciting or important.

RIP Mr Gray, you mad old thing.

[buttgammon]

Awesome writer. I read Lanark when I was a teenager and it blew me away; it was such a formative book for me that I've been a bit scared to read it again since. I followed with 1982, Janine and Poor Things. The former was a mindboggling book for a 17 or 18 year old lad to read, and I've just started on it again. So many of the things I've read since those teenage years are things I've been led to by Gray's work one way or another.

[ASFTSN]

One of the last "renaissance person" type artists I reckon. RIP.

[Hey, Punk!]

He got me back into imaginative fiction after I spent a few pained years only reading the CLASSICS (without engaging in any real differentiation). Wouldn't have discovered writers like Machen, Delaney, M John Harrison or Gene Wolfe without the turn back to genre fiction it inspired, and may have given up on reading fiction altogether, so I have him to thank for that.

RIP