It's Beginning To Hurt

Description

A brilliant new collection from one of our finest story writers, also a celebrated contemporary poet. 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 gamut of human passions. The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.

James Lasdun's books include The Fall Guy and Give Me Everything You Have- On Being Stalked. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University and reviews regularly for the Guardian. His work has been filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged) and he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsg rd.

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 *