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  • Published: 15 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099512325
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

It's Beginning To Hurt




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.

  • Published: 15 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099512325
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

James Lasdun

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 Skarsgård.

Also by James Lasdun

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Praise for It's Beginning To Hurt

Lasdun specialises in capturing, with unnerving insight, the split seconds in which moods and emotions turn on triggers so fine and subtle that they're barely perceptible. He nails these moments perfectly, spiking the core of the microgram of fly in the ointment and thus catching the infinitesimal moment with startling perception

Leyla Sanai, www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com

James Lasdun is one of those gifted writers who seems to have avoided the attention he deserves....It's Beginning to Hurt is, in places, the best story collection I have read since Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins.

http://theasylum.wordpress.com

Inhabits his characters with the seemingly effortless sympathy of the gifted realist writer... Deserves all the honours it is able to accrue: a better book of short stories will not be published this year

Kevin Power, The Irish Times

A wonderful writer

Irish Independent

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

Scotsman

Lasdun's third collection of short stories is nothing short of a revelation... each story is raised to amazing heights by the author's incredibly incisive prose

Oldham Evening Chronicle

A sobering study of how humans cope when under pressure. Lasdun's prose is undeniably sound. Ingenious sentences are strung together with ease

Sunday Herald

A good collection of short stories ought to be as enticing as a gift of fruit or flowers, even if the apple conceals a poison, the rose a canker. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures as James Lasdun.

Richard T Kelly, Financial Times

James Lasdun, poet, novelist, short story writer and Englishman turned American émigré, offers up permutations of suppressed inner turmoil

The List

There is something so rich and gripping in his prose that it simply elicits your attention... It's Beginning to Hurt is a collection to jump-start your imagination

Aesthetica

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

Guardian

Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Tom Deveson, Sunday Times

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

Dark, exact and bitterly funny collection... sharp, thought-provoking and fiercely readable

Time Out

Striking collection of humane short stories.

Must reads, The Sunday Times

Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching.

John Burnside, The Times

a collection whose seemingly ordinary surfaces conceal precipitous depths

Claire Allree, Metro

The narratives seem opened up to the entire history of fiction... touching...revelatory...devastating

Mark Kamine, Times Literary Supplement

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

These stories have been well made and have been carefully fitted together... undeniably classy

Sameer Rahim, Daily Telegraph

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

guardian.co.uk

A marvellous, masterful collection

LA Times

Short stories from a master prose miniaturist

New Statesman

A master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties

Guardian, Geoff Dyer

Precisely observed and chilling

Scotsman

Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times

Lasdun is a smart writer with an excellent sense of pace

Peter Scot, Daily Telegraph

Lasdun bravely identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince

Chris Ross, Guardian

Superb... punchy, exhilarating collection

James Urquhart, Financial Times

Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight

Frances O'Rourke, Irish Times

Lasdun's characters from New York and the Sussex countryside create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of his prose

Sunday Times Summer Reading