Edinburgh Bookfestival August 2009

Vincent Lam - Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Über den Autor:
http://www.vincentlam.ca/about.php

Kurzbeschreibung:
Lam's debut collection, a Canadian best-seller, unblinkingly captures the angst, personal and professional, of four University of Ottawa med students as they wend their ways from classroom to residency. The trials of Ming, Sri, Chen, and Fitz ricochet from heartbreaking to darkly humorous with precious little downtime in between. Alternating omniscience and the first-person musings of Chen, Lam uses the stories to plumb the four's good, bad, and ugly characteristics. Ming, the only woman, and Fitz try to sublimate and end up sabotaging their love for one another as they study for exams; Ming moves on. Sri becomes so personally attached to patients that at one point he begins to wonder whether it is he or a paranoid patient who is the true psychotic. Although Chen makes a Herculean effort to maintain tight control over his own humanity, he, too, struggles to keep private concerns separate from concomitant professional life-and-death decisions. Lam won a richly deserved Giller Prize for this tender, grisly, sad, funny, illuminating book. Chavez, Donna

James Lasdun – It´s beginning to hurt

Über den Autor:
James Lasdun, 1958 in London geboren, lehrte Creative Writing an verschiedenen Universitäten und lebt heute als Drehbuchautor, Schriftsteller und Kritiker in der Nähe von New York. Nach Kurzgeschichten und Gedichten erschien 2002 in Amerika sein erster Roman »Der Gehörnte« (»The horned man«).

Kurzbeschreibung:
The stories in this remarkable collection are vibrant, gripping and intricately worked, but they are more than simply small masterpieces of narrative art. James Lasdun's other great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic skill he exposes his characters' hidden desires and fears, drawing back the folds of their familiar self-delusions, their images of themselves, their habits and routines, to reveal them to themselves - and us - with brilliant clarity. 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.The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives. As James Wood, the celebrated critic, has noted, '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'. This collection of haunting, richly humane pieces - including the first winner of the National Short Story Award, 'An Anxious Man' - is further proof of the powers of enormously inventive writer.