It's Beginning to Hurt - Hardcover

Lasdun, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374299021 ISBN 13: 9780374299026

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

The stories in this remarkable collection—including “An Anxious Man,” winner of the National Short Story Prize (UK)—are vibrant and gripping. James Lasdun’s great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic skill he exposes his characters’ hidden desires and fears, drawing back the folds of their familiar self-delusions, their images of themselves, their habits and routines, to reveal their interior lives with brilliant clarity.

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of

Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the full range of human passions. They rise to unexpected heights of decency or stumble into comic or tragic folly. They throw themselves open to lust, longing, and paranoia—always recognizably mirrors of our own conflicted selves.

As James Wood has written, “James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing . . . When we read him we know what language is for again.” This collection of haunting, richly humane pieces is further proof of the powers of an enormously inventive writer.

About this title

Review:

"James Lasdun is probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story" (Guardian)

"Elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching... Many writers aim to create work that is unsettling, or perhaps even painful - though not, usually, too painful to bear, at least during the actual reading of the tale. Few, however, do it so well as James Lasdun" (John Burnside The Times)

"James Lasdun seems to me to be one of the secret gardens of English writing... when we read him we know what language is for" (James Wood)

"Highly intelligent, elegantly composed, darkly haunting and greatly moving, few writers could even hope to compare with Lasdun's literary brilliance" (Scotsman)

"Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness" (Tom Deveson Sunday Times)

Book Description:

A brilliant new collection from one of our finest story writers, also a celebrated contemporary poet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0374299021
• ISBN 13: 9780374299026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 227