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.

THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY" BEST BOOKS OF 2009
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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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.