James Lasdun

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun's acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun's most entertaining novel yet.

The Fall Guy

Chronicles the author's harrowing ordeal at the hands of an obsessed former student whose campaign of hate mail, violently anti-Semitic online postings and false public accusations were orchestrated to destroy his professional and personal life, in an account that also shares meditations on mental illness, Middle Eastern politics and the meaning of reputation in the Internet age. 25,000 first printing.

On Being Stalked

Give Me Everything You Have

It's beginning to hurt

Lawrence Miller, a British professor working in New York, relates the story of how someone is trying to frame him for a series of brutal murder.

The Horned Man: A Novel

Bir Faunun Öğleden Sonrası

Against a variety of stunningly evoked backgrounds, these powerfully, intensely focused stories reverberate "insistently in the reader's mind long after he has finished the book" ("New York Times

Besieged

Pia Davis

This book, now thoroughly revised and updated, is written to satisfy readers who want to build their holiday around walking, or those who simply want to integrate a bit of walking into their holiday. It begins with a "practicalities" section and extend into the walks themselves. From six or so "base towns," the authors offer routes of one or two hours, half day, and one, three, and five days. There are also some extraordinary walks worth going out of the way for. There are recommendations for restaurants, trattorias and pizzerias, as well as markets and other take-away options. Additionally, the book includes suggestions for lodging, transportation, flora and many other points of interest.

Revised Edition

Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria

Poems

Landscape with Chainsaw

Tash Aw

Joan Silber

Laura Furman

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories roam the world, from Nigeria to Venice, from an erupting volcano in Iceland to a brothel in the old Wild West. They feature a dazzling array of characters: a young American falling in love in Japan, a girl raised by snake-handling fundamentalists, an old man mourning his late wife, a fierce guard dog with a talent for escape. Accompanying the stories are the editor's introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list.

The O. Henry prize stories

A latest collection of works by the author of Seven Lies takes readers from the wilds of northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod in a volume that follows themes of self-delusion, hidden fears, and the illuminating potential of realizing one's true interior life.

Stories

It's Beginning to Hurt

Michael Hofmann

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses. Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

New Metamorphoses

After Ovid

"An instant masterpiece that brings the taut psychological precision of a Chekhov story to a hyper- modern, post- #MeToo setting."--Johanna Thomas-Corr, Guardian

Afternoon of a Faun

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. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests - girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident politics, which oddly seems to offer both. In time, by a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, 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 idolises. America seems everything he expected, and meanwhile 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 that life begins to fall apart... Exquisitely written and brilliantly imagined, James Lasdun's second novel is a terrifying plummet into anxiety, as complacency yields to an edgy paranoia. Pitching the furtive, shabby world of Communist Berlin against the glassy superficiality of contemporary New York, SEVEN LIES is an examination of the architecture of deceit - how deceit builds on itself until life is little more than an accretion of falsehood; how hope turns to fear, and dreams to nightmares.

Seven Lies

Concerned with transformations and dislocations - both physical and emotional - the poems in James Lasdun's second collection speak exquisitely of desire and loss. Jetlagged, estranged, out of synch or out of kilter, the figures in these poems sometimes just miss each other, sometimes connect explosively. And under their feet - whether it's a Roman pavement, a hill-path in Mexico, a Surrey lawn or a New York street - there is always something primitive, turbulent, ready to reveal itself. Intellectually rigorous, musical and deftly formal these apparently classical poems blend a dark, erotic animus with an exhilarating wit.

The Revenant

Paul Bowles

"James Lasdun's third book of poems explores the themes and tensions of his last two with a new boldness and exuberance, in a series of poems about life in the Catskill mountains outside Woodstock, where the author moved with his family some years ago. Questions of exile and belonging, cutting ties and forming new bonds, figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world of the mountain wilderness - at once a stunning companion and a ferocious competitor. Out of this - 'the need to carve out a niche for ourselves;/our singular relation to what we love' - rises the book's central image- the chainsaw. Very much a real machine (given to the alarmed poet by his wife), it also comes to form a complex symbol in which all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical, brilliance. A brilliantly assured, deftly lyrical sequence, Landscape with Chainsawmelds passion with wit, the classical with the quotidian, in a thrilling meditation on history, love, cultural identity and the anxiety of displacement. As an examination of the complexities of deracination and domesticity, it marks the matured genius of one of England

"Brilliant ....certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English."—Anthony Hecht, author of The Darkness and the Light An exuberant and bold series of poems drawing on the poet's life in the Catskill Mountains. Questions of exile and belonging figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world. In the chainsaw—the book's central image—all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical brilliance.

Landscape with Chainsaw: Poems

Taut, stylish, and psychologically acute, Afternoon of a Faun dramatizes the search for truth as an accusation of sexual assault plunges a journalist into a series of deepening crises. "The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of ‘belief.’ " When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault in her memoir, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly and inexorably to the brink of ruin. His reputation and livelihood at stake, Marco confides in a close friend, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth. This unnamed friend is drawn, magnetized, into the orbit of the woman at the center of the accusation—and finds his position as the safely detached narrator turning into something more dangerous. Soon, the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid. Set during the months leading up to Donald Trump’s election, with detours into the 1970s, this propulsive novel investigates the very meaning of truth at a time when it feels increasingly malleable. An atmospheric and unsettling drama from a novelist acclaimed as “the literary descendent of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith” (Boston Globe), Afternoon of a Faun combines a sharply observed study of our shifting social mores with a meditation on what makes us believe, or disbelieve, the stories people tell about themselves.

Afternoon of a Faun: A Novel

In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge. It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.

James Lasdun

About

Books

Join the club