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.

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's 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 Lasdun's 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.

THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY" BEST BOOKS OF 2009
THE "WALL STREET JOURNAL" BEST FICTION OF 2009
"LIBRARY JOURNAL" BEST BOOKS OF 2009
FAVORITE 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 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."

Two timely novellas exploring male sexual violence, power and corruption

‘Victory 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, Observer

Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal – these are the coordinates that drive James Lasdun’s 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 husband’s 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.

"Unputdownable... a masterpiece of chilling, mesmerizing control.'"—Michael Dirda , Washington Post

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. Reading group guide included.

"[W]hen we read him we know what language is for again."—James Wood, The Guardian

"The wit and live, tactile intelligence here is beautiful, thrilling."—Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin

"[A]n exquisitely imagined thriller of the darkest hue."—Seattle Times, Fionn Meade

"Were Alfred Hitchcock still around, he'd surely be a fan of this.... all the elements of one of Hitchcock's great films'"—Time Out New York, John Freeman

"Witty, inventive, and engaging from start to finish."—Boston Globe, Scott W. Helman

"A remarkable, unsettling novel."—Toronto Globe and Mail, Martin Levin

"A Jamesian exercise in sensibility, certainly, but with a glistening thrillerish edge..."—The Guardian [London]

"A tale of Borgesian complexity...reminiscent of a set of nested Russian dolls."—The Independent

"[A] marvellous novel, both compellingly readable - I literally could not put it down - and deeply philosophical."—The Scotsman

"A brilliant novel that must be reread at least once."—The Independent on Sunday

"This is an exquisite and frightening book...The Horned Man is a page turner."—Evening Standard [London]

"This psycho-thriller is clever, stunning and uncomfortable. Its twists had me thinking strange thoughts for days."—Daily Mail

"Lasdun has hauled out something deeply disturbing and compelling from a pristine darkness of his own."—The Observer

"A beautifully imagined story, singular in its observations of human life and the shifting realities of ourselves and all that is around us."—Paula Fox

"There are hints of Nabokov and Chandler in this superb piece of invention and implosion. Lasdun's wide-ranging imagination and wit is bounded only by a brevity compared to which Raymond Carver seems wordy."—Dale Peck

"A wonderful first novel from a writer with a poet's gift for precision. The Horned Man is an elegantly troubling, and often very funny, fable of sexual obsession and urban unease which Lasdun brings to a genuinely startling culmination."—A. L. Kennedy

"The Horned Man is a beautiful and deeply disturbing book, one that defies simple explanation. A man's life begins to unravel at the mercy of what appears to be a conspiracy, and in James Lasdun's deft hands, this dissolution assumes the harrowing, irresistible power of a nightmare."—Jennifer Egan

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."

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."

"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." —Helen Vendler

With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics.

Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses.

Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

THIS BOOK, NOW THOROUGHLY REVISED AND UPDATED, IS WRITTEN TO SATISFY READERS WHO WANT TO BUILD THEIR HOLIDAY AROUND WALKING, OR THOSE WHO SIMPLY WANT TO INTEGRATE A BIT OF WALKING INTO THEIR HOLIDAY. IT BEGINS WITH A "PRACTICALITIES" SECTION AND EXTEND INTO THE WALKS THEMSELVES. FROM SIX OR SO "BASE TOWNS," THE AUTHORS OFFER ROUTES OF ONE OR TWO HOURS, HALF DAY, AND ONE, THREE, AND FIVE DAYS. THERE ARE ALSO SOME EXTRAORDINARY WALKS WORTH GOING OUT OF THE WAY FOR. THERE ARE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RESTAURANTS, TRATTORIAS AND PIZZERIAS, AS WELL AS MARKETS AND OTHER TAKE-AWAY OPTIONS. ADDITIONALLY, THE BOOK INCLUDES SUGGESTIONS FOR LODGING, TRANSPORTATION, FLORA AND MANY OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST.

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?

Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, "Seven Lies" tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young East German, whose yearnings for love, glory, and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. By a series of increasingly dangerous maneuvers, he makes this fantasy come true, his past seemingly locked behind the Berlin Wall and a new life of unbounded bliss ahead of him. But then his world begins to fall apart.

The three works collected in this volume, all written in 1924, explore the profound effects on protagonists who embark on psychological voyages of liberation. In St Mawr, Lou Witt buys a beautiful, untamable bay stallion and discovers an intense affinity with the horse that she cannot feel with her husband. This superb novella displays Lawrence's mastery of satirical comedy in a scathing depiction of London's fashionable horse riding set. 'The Princess' portrays the intimacy between an aloof woman and her male guide as she travels through New Mexico in search of new experiences, while in 'The Woman who Rode Away' a woman's religious quest in Mexico brings great danger - and astonishing self-discovery.