It's Beginning To Hurt

<p> 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 ?ction . . . Touching and revelatory . . . Devastating. --Mark Kamine, The Times Literary Supplement <p> 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)<p> 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 <p> A gem . . . James Lasdun writes the best sort of English prose. --Colin Greenland, The Guardian <p> A story master. --Tim Adams, The Observer (London)<p> [Lasdun] create[s] a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive . . . His prose [here] is marked by a ?ne, 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)<p> [A] marvelous, masterful collection. --Lizzie Skurnick, Los Angeles Times <p> Like such masters of dark literature as Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, Lasdun limns the deep cracks in the soul even as his tales are enlivened by his gift for insight and ear for language. His stories are a fury of elements: skilled dramatic monologues; sketches of fraught emotional states . . . [which] are shot thr