James Lasdun

Una viuda enamorada de un hombre que podría ser su hijo, un encuentro inesperado de viejos compañeros de la universidad, un hombre que cree que está a punto de morir, una pareja de amigos de viaje por el norte de Grecia. Los personajes de ''Esto empieza a doler'' se mueven entre el azar y el peligro pero protegidos, sin embargo, por la ficcion que se han creado para vivir sin que las cosas duelan. James Lasdun se acerca a ellos a traves de sus desvelos cotidianos, de sus temores, para acabar mostrando, tambien, cuales son sus deseos, sus ansias, sus ganas de seguir estando en un mundo que siempre ofrece el gesto inconmensurable de la vida.

En medio de un clima de tensiones políticas, el joven Stefan Vogel sueña con llegar a Estados Unidos, un país en el que espera encontrar el amor, la gloria y la libertad. Hará todo lo posible por conseguir dar forma a sus deseos y dejara al otro lado del muro de Berlin un oscuro secreto. Finalmente conseguira llegar a Estados Unidos y casarse con la mujer perfecta, pero de repente su idilico mundo comienza a resquebrajarse.

Lawrence Miller, inglés, es profesor en un pequeño college a las afueras de NY. Su ordenada vida empieza a desintegrarse cuando le empiezan a pasar cosas a las que no encuentra explicación: el punto de lectura de un libro de su despacho fuera de lugar, archivos del ordenador borrados, saluda en el parque a una chica que despues sera asesinada, encuentra el ojo de cristal de su vecino en su bolsillo trasero....Nos encontramos atrapados dentro de la cabeza de Lawrence mientras atraviesa las calles de Manhattan persiguiendo a sus perseguidores. De una evidente agudeza intelectual, Psique es una novela imposible de olvidar.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE**Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, longs for love, glory and freedom - yearnings that 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...

James Lasduns new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the books central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of Stones through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of Dog Days, with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the authors strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled verbal terrorist, who began trying, in her words, to ruin him. Hate-mail much of it violently anti-Semitic online postings and public accusations of theft and sexual misconduct, have been her weapons of choice, and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, have proved remarkably difficult to combat.James Lasduns account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humour, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle-Eastern politics, and the meaning of honour and reputation in the internet age.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2020**Two timely novellas exploring male sexual violence, power and corruptionVictory makes a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today An instant masterpiece Johanna Thomas-Corr, ObserverLove and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal these are the coordinates that drive James Lasduns two intensely gripping, darkly comic novellas of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control. In Feathered Glory the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husbands life. The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Together these stories offer a sharply observed vision that will resonate with anyone interested in the clash of power and desire in our embattled contemporary lives.

This collection combines stories from his previous books THE SILVER AGE and THREE EVENINGS. In these stories James Lasdun views greed and excess from illuminating angles and the impulse of those who own too much to dispossess themselves. He examines the callousness by which adults lose influence over children and the instinctive tactics devised by children for gaining power over adults. He calls corruption, in its ingenious guises, to account while acknowledging the perverse fascination of human foibles. Each story casts a curious spell, in which objects and the natural world are tinged with an aura of the magical. A sensuous lyricism of prose governed by a witty and subtle intelligence brings these stories their very special flavour.

Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountain-top house over the summer. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines.When a fourth person arrives, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. Who is the real victim? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy?

James Lasduns 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 books 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 Chainsaw melds 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 Englands most important poets.

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.

Lawrence Miller, an English expatriate in New York, tells the story of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to frame him for a series of brutal killings. The intricate plot entangles Miller, a teacher of Gender Studies, in the lives of a womanising colleague under investigation for sexual harassment, a lonely attorney who has developed an inexplicable passion for Miller, and a shadowy Bulgarian who adapts Kafka for the stage, is prone to acts of explosive violence, and may or may not be sleeping under Millers office desk. As the novel spirals to its shocking conclusion, Lawrence Miller traverses, in terror, the streets of Manhattan, tracking the lines of human connection across the city and out to the decaying suburbs beyond, in wild pursuit of his persecutors.

Se trata de dos novelas cortas de gran calado psicológico. Lasdun está considerado el Chéjov del siglo XXI. Los temas son de gran actualidad: la explotación sexual y la traición. Escritas con gran inteligencia, tratan del amor y el sexo en nuestra era. Advierte de los peligros del movimiento MeToo. En esta epoca en la que se vive el final de las prerrogrativas masculinas, representa de manera exquisita la ambiguedad moral y la facinacion de algunos hombres por los logros de otros hombres. Lasdun trata temas escabrosos con imagenes muy potentes y delicadas y utiliza el dialogo con gran maestria.

A lo largo de la historia se han escrito innumerables textos sobre el deseo y especialmente sobre el deseo en la relación sexual. En todos ellos aparece el juego, que muchas veces tiene que ver con la relacion espectral, la de verte en el otro y la de verte a ti mismo y al otro como un espectro. James Lasdun, en plena vivencia de acoso por parte de una de sus alumnas de Escritura Creativa en Princeton, decide viajar a lugares de culto creados bajo la fuerza del deseo y recordar leyendas, novelas o dramas que sostienen nuestra cultura para entender el mecanismo del deseo no cumplido que nos mueve a querer destruir lo desesado. James Lasdun, considerado el Chejov del siglo XXI, representa de manera exquisita la ambiguedad moral Dame todo lo que tengas es un exquisito libro de memorias, el diario de un acoso que dura cinco años y que pasa por distintas etapas de destruccion de la persona publica de James Lasdun a traves de todas las herramientas digitales, desde un sofisticado discurso de odio que cada vez se hace mas burdo y desesperado. En ese diario, James Lasdun se ve atravesado por un conocimiento de si mismo al que cualquier persona en una situacion normal no es capaz de enfrentarse.

James Lasdun, autor de Victoria (De Conatus 2019), sigue en este libro su objetivo de buscar los mecanismos psicológicosy morales que nos mueven a las personas en estos tiempos. Y este es su caso real, su vivencia deacoso durante años por parte de una brillante alumna de Escritura Creativa en la universidad de Princeton. Atraves de esta situacion vemos de donde nace el deseo y a donde nos puede llevar. Vemos la relacion especular entrela victima y el opresor y la libertad que esta al otro lado de ese montaje que alimenta el ego hasta la enfermedad que sellama Internet.Lasdun hace referencias a grandes libros de la historia que ya trataban el tema, solo es nuevo el medio donde se produceel ataque, un medio con una gran capacidad de accion. indaga en su condicion de hijo de arquitecto famoso que vive bajo elamparo del exito del padre. Hace un recorrido por los cauces legales e insuficientes para acabar con el acoso y porla importancia de la reputacion a dia de hoy y la dependencia de Internet.

A masterclass in calm, hard reasoning Helen GarnerJames Lasdun [is] one of our very best true crime documentarians... A riveting accountJoyce Carol OatesWhat drives a loving family man with everything to lose to become a killer? In March of 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and their younger son Paul at their home in South Carolinas Lowcountry. The story became headline news around the world, with its outlandish revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its centre.James Lasdun explores the psychological puzzle at the heart of the story, which the murder trial failed to answer. Why did Alex Murdaugh murder his wife and son?Featuring a cast of villains ranging from supposedly respectable lawyers to violent street gang members and a gothic setting in a small town in Americas deep south, The Family Man is a gripping, immersive, twisting investigation of a double murder that seems to defy explanation.Meticulous, spotlessly written, and clear-eyedPaul Tremblay

Se trata de dos novelas cortas de gran calado psicológico. Lasdun está considerado el Chéjov del siglo XXI. Los temas son de gran actualidad: la explotación sexual y la traición. Escritas con gran inteligencia, tratan del amor y el sexo en nuestra era. A