It's Beginning To Hurt

a collection whose seemingly ordinary surfaces conceal precipitous depths

Claire Allree, Metro

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

A marvellous, masterful collection

LA Times

A master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties

Guardian, Geoff Dyer

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 wonderful writer

Irish Independent

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

Time Out

Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight

Frances O'Rourke, Irish 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

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

Scotsman

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 Deserves all the honours it is able to accrue: a better book of short stories will not be published this year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

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

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

Guardian

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

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

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

The List

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

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

Tom Deveson, Sunday Times

Lasdun is a smart writer with an excellent sense of pace

Peter Scot, Daily Telegraph

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

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

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

Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times

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

Precisely observed and chilling

Scotsman

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

John Burnside, The Times

Short stories from a master prose miniaturist

New Statesman

Striking collection of humane short stories.

Must reads, The Sunday Times

Superb... punchy, exhilarating collection

James Urquhart, Financial Times

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

Mark Kamine, Times Literary Supplement

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

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

Sameer Rahim, Daily Telegraph