James Lasdun Books In Order

The Horned Man

The Horned Man opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying tale of a man losing his place in the world. As Lawrence Miller an English expatriate and professor of gender studies tells the story of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to frame him for a series of brutal killings, we descend into a world of subtly deceptive appearances where persecutor and victim continually shift roles, where paranoia assumes an air of calm rationality, and where enlightenment itself casts a darkness in which the most nightmarish acts occur. As the novel races to its shocking conclusion, we follow Miller as he traverses the streets of Manhattan and the decaying suburbs beyond, in terrified pursuit of his pursuers. Written with sinuous grace and intellectual acuity, The Horned Man is an extraordinary, unforgettable first novel by an acclaimed writer and poet of unusual power. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Penzler Pick, April 2002: Already a sensation in his native England, this first novel by expatriate James Lasdun is one of the most disturbing and compelling books you are likely to read this year.

The protagonist, Lawrence Miller, is himself an expat teaching gender studies at a small college located just outside New York City. He is a member of the sexual harassment committee which meets on a regular basis to walk that fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous of political correctness.

Miller’s well ordered life starts to disintegrate one day when he takes a book from the shelf in his office to find that the bookmark has been moved several pages although, as far as he knows, nobody has visited his office. An easily explained lapse of memory perhaps, but Miller decides he will discuss it with the therapist he has been seeing in Manhattan since his wife left him. He is shocked as he approaches her office to see the therapist walking towards him, but she turns off towards Central Park before he can speak to her and he then loses sight of her. When he arrives at her office, however, she is waiting for him as usual and assures him that she has not left her office; in fact, she is always with another patient before Miller’s appointment.

So begins the disorientation of Lawrence Miller. He has his little obsessions, of course he won’t pick up the messages on his answering machine, for instance, in order to convince himself that while he was out his wife tried to call him. Still in love with her, he hopes that she will call and want to return to him. But this is just a game he plays, part of his very human nature. He is in no way the sort of man who is paranoid or imagines conspiracies, but the unexplained incidents seem to be increasing.

Miller tries to rationalize what is happening, but he can’t help thinking, nor can we, that he has become the target of somebody who wishes him harm. And when a series of murders takes place, Miller begins to suspect that he is being set up to take the blame for these murders by a devious and diabolical mind.

Lawrence Miller struggles to loosen the hold his pursuers have on him, but the more he struggles the more he appears to be drowning. Try to sleep after reading his terrifying story. Otto Penzler

Seven Lies

A darkly brilliant tale by a writer whose last novel was ‘a masterpiece’ Washington Post and ‘Poe for the 21st century’ Salon. Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory, and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. By a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous maneuvers, he contrives to make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of his dreams but also married to the woman he idolizes. America seems everything he expected, and his secrets are safely locked away behind the Berlin Wall. A new life of unbounded bliss seems to have been granted to him. And then the world begins to fall apart. Skillfully rendered and compulsively readable, Seven Lies secures James Lasdun’s stature as a novelist of the highest order.

Three Evenings

A collection of short stories by the author of ‘The Silver Age’. Each character is engaged on some internal odyssey towards personal knowledge, and each story represents part of that journey. They are narratives of desire and betrayal, propelled by an erotic charge.

Besieged

James Lasdun’s two collections of short stories, Delirium Eclipse and Three Evenings, have won him outstanding praise as one of the most distinctive British writers of his generation, both as a stylist and as a storyteller. His work has been described by the New York Times Book Review as an ‘elegant pathology report on the modern soul,’ and the Village Voice calls his prose ‘art that burrows into troubling new territory even as it glides by like a dream.’ Besieged shows his gift for exploring the undertones of contemporary experience at its most haunting and electrically charged. Against a variety of stunningly evoked backgrounds from the teeming banks of the Ganges in Varanasi to a homeless shelter in New York these powerful, intensely focused narratives reverberate, as Michiko Kakutani put it in the New York Times, ‘insistently in the reader’s mind long after he has finished the book.’ In ‘Ate/Menos’ or ‘The Miracle,’ a young man takes unscrupulous advantage of a woman who mistakes him for someone else and finds himself enmeshed in her desperate obsessions and nightmares. In ‘The Siege,’ a wealthy recluse falls in love with the immigrant woman who lives in his baseme*nt. On discovering she is married and that her husband is a political prisoner, he embarks on a course of action that will lead simultaneously to his destruction and to his salvation. Two of the stories in this collection were made into major independent film. ‘Ate Menos’ was the basis for the film Sunday, which won the Grand Jury Best Feature Award at Sundance. ‘The Siege’ was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Besieged.

It’s Beginning To Hurt

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY BEST BOOKS OF 2009THE WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST FICTION OF 2009LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2009FAVORITE FICTION OF 2009 FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMESJames Lasdun’s great gift is his instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. 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 range of human passions. As James Wood has written, ‘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 Lasdun has published two previous collections of stories, three books of poetry, and two novels, including The Horned Man, which was a New York Times Notable Book. He was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. 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, the dramatic stories in this collection including An Anxious Man, winner of the National Short Story Prize UK 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. Lasdun s novels succeed as efficient entertainments, narrowly focused, linguistically dextrous, coolly presenting their characters foibles…
His short stories relinquish none of this gamesmanship, yet they seem to expand where the novels contract…
Their characters have a complexity and confusion that override the unfolding plot. And the narratives seem opened up to the entire history of fiction…
Touching and revelatory…
Devastating. Mark Kamine, The Times Literary Supplement Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching…
This is a collection that examines the most inward mechanisms of rage, fear and desire with astonishing skill and strangely lyric power. John Burnside, The Times London Lasdun has a Nabokovian eye. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures…
It s Beginning to Hurt is…
a superlative collection, exhibiting all of Lasdun s familiar talents and a few new ones into the bargain. Richard T. Kelly, Financial Times A gem…
James Lasdun writes the best sort of English prose. Colin Greenland, The Guardian UK A story master. Tim Adams, The Observer London Lasdun create s a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive…
His prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness…
Lasdun uses his dramatic skill to show the most subtle and delicate movements between poles of feeling. Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times London There is much to admire in Lasdun’s stories, not least the astonishing beauty and precision of his imagery. In a few perfectly chosen words, Lasdun can distill a character’s essence and bring him to life. David Bezmozgis, author of Natasha’Stellar collection combines a sharp eye for detail, subtle character development and virtuosic command of narrative voice. A British native who now lives in upstate New York, Lasdun also writes poetry, novels and screenplays, but his fourth volume of stories suggests that his strength lies in the short form. The title piece is the shortest, less than two and a half pages, and functions as the prose equivalent of haiku in its evocation of an affair, a death and a marriage that is all but dead. Yet that same title could apply to practically every one of these stories, which often detail a pivotal point at which a man usually comes to terms with his essential character and discovers something hurtful or troubling about himself. In ‘An Anxious Man’ most of the titles are far more generic than the stories themselves, an inheritance disrupts a family’s equilibrium, as the wife’s attempts to play the stock market during an economic downturn make the husband fearful of everything, even as he questions his judgment. ‘Was it possible to change?’ asks the protagonist of ‘The Natural Order,’ a faithful husband whose trip with an incorrigible womanizer leaves him both appalled and envious. In ‘Cleanness,’ a widower’s marriage to a much younger woman forces his son to confront his own indelible impurities. ‘A Bourgeois Story’ explores ‘the peculiar economy of…
conscience,’ as an unexpected reunion of college friends, one of whom has become a well to do lawyer while the other has turned increasingly radical, leaves the former as uncomfortable with his own life as he is with his one time friend. Chance encounters and unlikely connections prove particularly revelatory throughout. The piece that is least like the others, ‘Annals of the Honorary Secretary,’ provides a mysterious parable of art that concludes, ‘Like most lyric gifts, it was short lived. On the other hand, the critical exegesis has only just begun.’ Merits comparison with the understated artistry of William Trevor or Graham Swift.’ Kirkus Reviews starred review’As he proved with Seven Lies, Lasdun is an elegant and incisive student of the human mind an author who can register exactly when, for a character, ‘It’s Beginning To Hurt.’ This remarkable collection shows what happens when we break through the gauze of everydayness and existential panic hits. In ‘An Anxious Man,’ for instance, a man at his beach house sweats out the stock market, then is suddenly terrified because the new next door neighbors with whom his daughter has spent the night seem suddenly to have vanished. In ‘The Natural Order,’ two men one assured and charismatic and the other reserved hike together through Greece; it’s the charming loudmouth who finally loses his cool. In ‘Annals of the Honorary Secretary,’ a believably surreal tale, a society that meets regularly to display special talents is upended by a young woman with the telepathic ability to make members see truly ugly and frightening things. ‘Oh, Death’ features a backwoods guy who lives and dies with only the narrator to wonder what his life really meant…
Affecting, yes; sentimental, no. Hard edged truths about our predicament poke through this work, which is highly recommended.’ Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal starred review’This accomplished poet, novelist, and story writer’s collection packs a devastating punch. Lasdun peels back the facades of middle aged, middle class types through their run ins with cancer, infidelity and loss that lead them to deal with unexpectedly large and often ugly recognitions. The title story is less than three full pages, but generates near boundless futility and regret as a businessman, having just attended the funeral of a long forgotten former lover, can’t help falling back into the old habit of lying to his wife about how he’s spent the day. ‘The Incalculable Life Gesture’ builds to a climax of relief as an elementary school principal, feuding with his sister, follows through a series of tests that indicate he has lymphoma until a specialist reveals the truth of his ailment. In ‘Peter Kahn’s Third Wife,’ a sales assistant in a jewelry boutique models necklaces for a wealthy wine importer who brings in a series of successive wives to be over the years. Jewels of resignation and transformative personal disaster, these stories are written so simply and cleanly that the formidable craft looks effortless.’ Publishers Weekly starred review

Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria

James Lasdun and Pia Davis offer forty walks through the spectacular countryside of Tuscany and Umbria. Arranged for the utmost flexibility from half day outings easily accessible from a city base to day walks that can be linked together in a series the itineraries combine the pleasures of walking and eating with one of the most enchanting landscapes in the world. Calling at medieval hill towns, secluded Benedictine abbeys, spring fed pools, and Etruscan ruins, Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria enables travelers to discover Italy’s finest delights in a singularly rewarding way. Featuring: New and revised walks Clear, easy to follow maps Suggestions for local food and wine and the best restaurants, hotels, and family run accommodations Half day, full day, or overnight itineraries Practical tips, including information on climate, what to take, what to wear, and much more

Walking and Eating in Provence

Foodie authors James Lasdun and Pia Davis offer forty walks through the extraordinary landscape of Provence, each specially designed to combine natural beauty, historical interest and, of course, world class local cuisine. James and Pia offer a wide array of itineraries, from multi day adventures that are linked by train to short half day excursions. This is a guide that is perfect for both doers and dreamers for those who are planning a trip to Provence and those who want to explore the region from the comfort of their home. From the fjord like calanques near Marseilles, through the classic Provencal villages of the Luberon mountains, to the remote wilderness of the Mercantour National Park, Moon Walking and Eating in Provence guides travelers through the best sights and flavors of this remarkable region of France.