The first sixteen tales in this collection were published by Canongate
in 1983 with the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This collection also
has fifty-seven tales from later books, plus sixteen new ones written
for the hardback publication of this collection. This last section,
Tales Droll and Plausible, shows that Gray's recent
twenty-first-century fiction is as uncomfortably funny and up to date as
his earliest.