It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun

London-born New Yorker James Lasdun writes poetry and full-length novels, but is perhaps best known for his short fiction. With his new collection It's Beginning to Hurt, Lasdun showcases his ability to clearly depict the emotional lives of his characters without resorting to the third person. Whether he is using short bursts of dialogue between characters, or internal monologue, Lasdun is able to quickly and entirely successfully
realize the people populating his stories and strip away their facades at the precise moments that their emotions clash and overtake them in the process. Rage, paranoia, lust, terror are all well represented in these stories, but relief, hope, and even love make appearances as well. What makes these stories so interesting goes beyond Lasdun's skillful exactness in depicting these crisis points - it is his ability to clearly depict the effects these emotions have on people, and how their lives are or are not changed by them.

In "An Anxious Man" (winner of the National Short Story Prize) a loser at the stock market finds himself fearing a much greater loss when his daughter disappears from a sleep-over at the house of a family he has just met. Rage threatens to destroy more than one new life in "Totty," when June's countryside escape from roaring, adulterous 1990s London is threatened by blackmail. A widowed father's wedding following the loss of a first wife paradoxically relieves a son's feelings of apprehension and self-disgust in "Cleanness," a clever twist on the prodigal son chestnut, and in the delightfully (and physically revolting) atmospheric piece "Annals of the Honorary Secretary," Lasdun examines fear of and fascination with the ultimate unknown. In "Oh, Death," the collection's tour de force, Lasdun takes a neighbor's simple recounting of an unhappy man's life and literally brings him face to face with his mortality, in the form of the story's reader herself.

If you enjoy this collection, you may want to try one of Lasdun's longer works, such as his novel The Horned Man. Lasdun is frequently compared to Nabokov for his powers of observation, and a collection of the latter's short fiction might satisfy those looking for like-minded stories. Kafka and Updike are other writers of short works with whom Lasdun shares similarities. Finally, for a masterful graphic depiction of the short form that also powerfully depicts the push and pull of human emotion, try Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, a collection in graphic novel format from his long running Optic Nerve comic.