James Salter

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is the intensely carnal story—part shocking reality, part feverish dream —of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen—and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

A Novel

A Sport and a Pastime

This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. Even as he lingers over the lustrous surface of Viri and Nedra's marriage, James Salter makes us see the cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will in time mar it beyond repair. "An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time".

Light Years

Returning to America after World War II, former naval officer Philip Bowman finds a position as a book editor and loses himself in a world of intimate connections and surprising triumphs until he is betrayed by the woman he loves, which sets him on a course he could never have imagined for himself. 35,000 first printing.

All that is

Now available in paperback, the long-awaited first collection of short stories by the author of A Sport and a Pastime.

Dusk and Other Stories

With his stirring, rapturous first novel--originally published in 1956 --James Salter established himself as the most electrifying prose stylist since Hemingway. Four decades later, it is clear that he also fashioned the most enduring fiction ever about aerial warfare. Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill--sometimes under dubious circumstances--Cleve's luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, The Hunters is a landmark in the literature of war.

The Hunters

A compilation of short fiction explores the themes of love, honor, friendship, sacrifice, memory, and abandon through the lives of a translator assisting in his wife's suicide, a rare books collector, a profoundly lonely married woman, and other characters.

Last Night

With prose at once stark and lyrical, Salter elucidates the spirit of those who abandon material pursuits in search of an unspoiled honesty. He tells of one man's quest to rise above the mundane in search of peace and self-fulfillment.

Solo Faces

"In Don’t Save Anything . . . Kay Eldredge Salter assembles her late husband’s bread–and–butter journalism—yet how delicious good bread and butter can be! . . . As always, Salter emphasizes simple, vivifying details." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post One of the greatest writers of American sentences in our literary history, James Salter’s acute and glimmering portrayals of characters are built with a restrained and poetic style. The author of several memorable works of fiction—including Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award—he is also celebrated for his memoir Burning the Days and many nonfiction essays. In her preface, Kay Eldredge Salter writes, “Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s nonfiction—articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it . . . One of the great pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer’s feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That’s what you’ll find here.” This collection gathers Salter’s thoughts on writing and profiles of important writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe that first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People, Condé Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, among other publications.

Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles

Don't Save Anything

Kay Salter

Celebrates the pleasures of food in a volume that includes an entry for every day of the year and contains a host of culinary wisdom, recipes, history, food lore, and personal reminiscences.

A Food Lover's Book of Days

Life is Meals

The author recounts his Manahattan youth and West Point education, his career as a combat pilot, and his life in the glamorous, international world of the writer

Recollection

Burning the Days

Sport & A Pastime

A Sport and a Pastime is an astonishing performance, the classic novel from a remarkable writer whose sentences bristle with a singular passion. Salter chronicles a love affair between a young shopgirl and an American college dropout against the backdrop of provincial France. The narrator's cool distillation of events-real or imagined-makes the book both lyrical and tightly, dangerously pitched.

Negra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But fine cracks are beginning to spread through the shimmering surface of their life - flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, tender and resonant, Light Years is an exquisite novel of lost lives and the elusiveness of happiness.

Een Amerikaans echtpaar lijkt een ideaal huwelijk te hebben, maar beide echtelieden hebben een verhouding met een ander.

Lichtjaren / druk 1

A Sport and a Pasttime

Een Amerikaanse man in de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw keert na heftige ervaringen in de oorlog met Japan terug naar New York, waar hij als redacteur gaat werken bij een uitgeverij.

Alles wat is

This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. Even as he lingers over the lustrous surface of Viri and Nedra's marriage, James Salter makes us see the cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will in time mar it beyond repair. "An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."

James Salter

About

Books

Join the club