Kirjahaku

This excursion into panic and urban paranoia opens with a man losing his place in a book, then deepens into a dark and terrifying story of a man losing his place in the world.

**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...

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.

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the authorââ?¬â?¢s strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled ââ?¬Ë?verbal terroristââ?¬â?¢, who began trying, in her words, to ââ?¬Ë?ruin himââ?¬â?¢.

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.

James Lasdun's 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.

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 TIMES James 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 in It's Beginning to Hurt 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."

A generous selection that shows the poet James Lasdun at his lyrically inventive bestTwo men grapple with jumper cables, trying "to make a stand // in this last corner of our realm; machinery . . ." A man on his way to see his therapist encounters a female police officer in an elevator and feels himself regressing to "the original essence, the masculine / criminal salt." A teenager is tricked into eating a spoonful of lime pickle by his girlfriend's father. An Englishman in the Catskills ponders the nature of exile, is chased by yellow jackets, gets a haircut. James Lasdun's subjects are often quotidian--but his treatment of them never is. Under his transformative gaze, the familiar becomes strange, the local becomes foreign, and the minor becomes epic.Lasdun has been winning acclaim since his first collection, 1988's A Jump Start--Helen Vendler has lauded his ability to give "brisk shape to contemporary and classical events"; The New York Times has praised the "sharp, slicing imagery" of his work. Now, in Bluestone, which selects from all three of his previous collections and includes poems from his fourth, Water Sessions, previously available only in the U.K., readers will be able to appreciate the full sweep of this capacious talent: his delicate wit, his gift for invention, his keen observational eye. It is a gathering that affirms Lasdun's position as, to quote Anthony Hecht, one of "the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English."

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.

Blending the classical with the cosmopolitan, the poems in this emotionally charged collection concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses of every kind. High-voltage encounters - with a police officer in a New York elevator, a gang of bag-slashers in Mexico City, a hitchhiker in Vermont - leave the record of their transfiguring impact in images of startling power and clarity. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into bravura meditations on love, myth, history, sexual and social politics. A dark, erotic animus, an exhilarating wit, and a dazzling command of language seduce and delight.

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 basement. 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."

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."

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.

Dreaming of a life of glory and freedom in America, East German youth Stefan Vogel engages in a series of increasingly dangerous adventures to attain his goal, which involves his marriage to the woman of his dreams and an escape from dark secrets hidden behind the Berlin Wall. By the author of The Horned Man. Reprint.

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.

When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly to the brink of ruin. Marco confides in a close friend, the unnamed narrator, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth--until the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid.

"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.

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.

Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal form the coordinates of these two intensely dramatic stories of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control.

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina's Lowcountry. In The Family Man, James Lasdun takes a new angle on this story of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its center. The acclaimed novelist brings his long-standing interest in the darker drives of the human psyche to investigate the events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle, examining Murdaugh through original interviews with those involved in the case, transcripts of phone calls Murdaugh made from prison, the literature of criminal psychology, and the murder trial itself. Deeply researched, sharply written, and with the page-turning intensity of a Southern gothic novel, The Family Man constructs a masterful portrait of Murdaugh and the mind-boggling crimes that wreaked havoc on his community in the Lowcountry.