Books by James Salter
The Hunters: A Novel
by James Salter
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.
Copies
No copies available.
Last Night
by James Salter
From a writer whose every book is a literary event, a superbly accomplished work of fiction. Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating.
In ten powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life–as it is and never will be again–when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend. A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog. A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife’s request to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. And in the title story, already hailed by Frank Conroy as “a masterpiece, clearly and without question,” a translator, tormented by an agonizing sense of inevitability, assists in his wife’s suicide even as he performs a last betrayal.
A haunting symphony of desire, memory, and loss–from a writer whose assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most compelling voices at work today.
Copies
No copies available.
Last Night: Stories
by James Salter
Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. These ten powerful stories portray men and women in their most intimate moments. A lover of poetry is asked by his wife to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. A book dealer is forced to face the truth about his life. And in the title story, a translator assists his wife’s suicide, even as he performs a last act of betrayal. James Salter’s assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most essential writers
Copies
No copies available.
There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter
by James Salter
This collection offers two dozen essays and sketches about one of the passions of Salter's lifetravela subject beloved by writers across the centuries. Over twenty years of skiing, hiking, climbing from Colorado to Japan to the Tyrol, from Austria and Switzerland to Germany and France, Salter is an engaging companion sharing his great enthusiasm and adventures.
James Salter's novels and volumes of memoir have been widely celebrated and he is now recognized as one of America's most important writers.
Copies
No copies available.
There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter
by James Salter
This collection offers two dozen essays and sketches about one of the passions of Salter’s life, travel, a subject beloved by writers across the centuries. Over twenty years of skiing, hiking, climbing from Colorado to Japan to the Tyrol, from Austria and Switzerland to Germany and France, Salter is an engaging companion sharing his great enthusiasm and adventures. James Salter’s novels and volumes of memoir have been widely celebrated and he is now recognized as one of America’s most important writers. Susan Sontag once remarked, [Salter] is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently.”
Copies
No copies available.
Cassada
by James Salter
James Salter returned to his second novel, The Arm of Flesh--not to revise it but to entirely rewrite it. The result is this great new work, Cassada.
The lives of officers in an Air Force squadron in occupied Europe encompass the contradictions of military experience and the men's response to a young newcomer, bright and ambitious, whose fate is to be an emblem of their own. In Cassada, Salter captures the strange comradeship of loneliness, trust, and alienation among military men ready to sacrifice all in the name of duty and pride.
After futile attempts at ordinary revision, Salter elected to begin with a blank page, to compose an entirely new novel based upon the characters and events of his second long unavailable novel, The Arm of Flesh. The result, Cassada, is a masterpiece, and the occasion of our hardcover edition was celebrated from coast to coast.
"That opening image of the two lost planes lingers throughout, evoking the dark, perilous stuff that aviators and pilot-scribes, from Saint-Exupéry and Richard Hillary to Hanna Reitsch, work in." --Paul West, The Washington Post Book World
"The air is thin in the heights through which Salter steers his characters, the prose moves at breakneck speed, and the book's emotional impact is devastating.... Cassada is a masterpiece, a book in which men wage an elemental battle for survival against invisible forces." --Mark Levine, Men's Journal
Copies
No copies available.
Cassada
by James Salter
The lives of officers in an Air Force squadron in occupied Europe encompass the contradictions of military experience and the men's response to a young newcomer, bright and ambitious, whose fate is to be an emblem of their own. In Cassada, Salter captures the strange comradeship of loneliness, trust, and alienation among military men ready to sacrifice all in the name of duty and pride.
After futile attempts at ordinary revision, Salter elected to begin with a blank page, to compose an entirely new novel based upon the characters and events of his second long unavailable novel, The Arm of Flesh. The result, Cassada, is a masterpiece.
Copies
No copies available.
Gods of Tin: The Flying Years
by James Salter
A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions.
James Salter is considered one of America's greatest prose stylists. The Arm of Flesh (later revised and retitled Cassada) and his first novel, The Hunters, are legendary in military circles for their descriptions of flying and aerial combat. A former Air Force pilot who flew F-86 fighters in Korea, Salter writes with matchless insight about the terror and exhilaration of the pilot's life.
Copies
No copies available.
Gods of Tin: The Flying Years
by James Salter
A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one’s life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions. As The New York Times noted, "It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it; Saint-Exupery was one; Salter is another."
The editors have gathered selections from a journal Salter kept during the Korean War, published here for the first time, and assembled selections from two novels, The Hunters and Cassada, and from the author’s celebrated memoir, Burning the Days. As the editors comment in a brief introduction, "It is, as a record of the day-to-day, mission-to-mission life of a young fighter pilot, a remarkable document by any standard. But it provides as well a view into the crucible of a writer’s beginnings, like pencil studies that precede a painting, in which the essential qualities of the artist’s hand are unmistakable.’ "
Copies
No copies available.
Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days
From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay—amateur chefs and perfect hosts—here is a charming, beautifully illustrated tour de table: a food lover's companion that, with an entry for each day of the year, takes us from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Year's Eve. Life Is Meals is rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors' own memories of successes and catastrophes.For instance: • The menu on the Titanic on the fatal night• Reflections on dining from Queen Victoria, JFK, Winnie-the-Pooh, Garrison Keillor, and many others• The seductiveness of a velvety Brie or the perfect martini• How to decide whom to invite to a dinner party—and whom not to• John Irving's family recipe for meatballs; Balzac's love of coffee• The greatest dinner ever given at the White House• Where in Paris Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter had French onion soup at 4:00 a.m.• How to cope with acts of God and man-made disasters in the kitchenSophisticated as well as practical, opinionated, and indispensable, Life Is Meals is a tribute to the glory of food and drink, and the joy of sharing them with others. "The meal is the emblem of civilization," the Salters observe. "What would one know of life as it should be lived, or nights as they should be spent, apart from meals?"
Copies
No copies available.
Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days
From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay—amateur chefs and terrific hosts—here is a charming, beautifully illustrated food lover’s companion that, with an entry for each day of the year, takes us from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Year’s Eve. Life Is Meals is rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors’ own stories of their triumphs—and catastrophes—in the kitchen.
For instance:
The menu on the Titanic on the fatal night
Reflections on dining from Queen Victoria, JFK, Winnie the Pooh, Garrison Keillor, and many others
The seductiveness of a velvety Brie or the perfect martini
How to decide whom to invite to a dinner party—and whom not to
John Irving’s family recipe for meatballs; Balzac’s love of coffee
The greatest dinner ever given at the White House
Where in Paris Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter had French onion soup at 4:00 a.m.
Sophisticated as well as practical, opinionated, and indispensable, Life Is Meals is a tribute to the glory of food and drink, and the joy of sharing them with others. “The meal is the emblem of civilization,” the Salters observe. “What would one know of life as it should be lived, or nights as they should be spent, apart from meals?”
Copies
No copies available.
Life Is Meals Journal: An Album for Epicures
by James Salter
For people who want to record their eating adventures and to store keepsakes from their memorable meals, this journal is peppered with eclectic passages from the literary gourmets James and Kay Salter.
A perfect gift for anyone who loves to eat, this journal is beautifully designed for creating a keepsake around life's greatest pleasure: food. Inspired by the bestselling book Life Is Meals, this journal provides plenty of space to record memories of delicious meals (whether they are enjoyed at restaurants, at dinner parties, or simply at home). The journal features heavy, album-bound pages so that it can accommodate dining memorabilia like matchbook covers, menus, labels, and other ephemera. Charming information about origins of everyday foods and table items and their famous circumstances are also sprinkled throughout.
Copies
No copies available.
A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)
by 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.
Copies
No copies available.
Dusk and Other Stories (Modern Library)
by James Salter
James Salter is an author with an impassioned following among contemporary readers, writers, and critics, and Dusk and Other Stories is among his signal achievements. First published nearly a quarter-century ago, and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital—each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace.
These stories chart the myriad moments and details that, taken together, shape a fate. Two New York attorneys newly flush with wealth embark on a dissolute tour of Italy. A divorced woman learns that she is about to lose the last thing of real value to her. An ambitious young screenwriter unexpectedly discovers the true meaning of art and glory. A rider, far off in the fields, is involved in an horrific accident—night is falling, and she must face her destiny alone.
Each of these stories is told with weighted calm, with a lingering mixture of precision and sudden revelation. They confirm James Salter as one of the finest writers of our time.
Copies
No copies available.
Light Years
by James Salter
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered 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 even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.
Copies
-
$18.00
The Art of Fiction (Kapnick Lectures)
by James Salter
James Salter’s exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all.
Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature’s master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey.
Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is "like a handful of radium"), Dreiser, Céline, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons.
Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of "importance"? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away.
Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures
Copies
No copies available.
Dusk and Other Stories (Modern Library Classics)
by James Salter
First published nearly a quarter-century ago and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital—each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace. Two New York attorneys newly flush with wealth embark on a dissolute tour of Italy; an ambitious young screenwriter unexpectedly discovers the true meaning of art and glory; a rider, far off in the fields, is involved in an horrific accident—night is falling, and she must face her destiny alone. These stories confirm James Salter as one of the finest writers of our time.
Copies
No copies available.
Solo Faces: A Novel
by James Salter
This novel exposes the obsession that draws climbers away from civilization to test themselves against the most intimidating and inaccessible mountains in the world.
James Salter captures the adventure of Gary, a roofer of churches, who feels restrained by conventions and flat ground. Unable to find happiness in his life, he travels to southern France to climb to the summits of the Alps. He finds peace and happiness within himself soon after. But when fellow climbers are trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one-man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always shunned. But the glory quickly dissapates and he returns to the anonymity he prefers, having thoroughly satisfied himself.
Copies
No copies available.
All That Is: A Novel (Vintage International)
by James Salter
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
An NPR "Great Reads" Book
All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. Philip Bowman returns to America from the battlefields of Okinawa and finds success in the competetive world of publishing in postwar New York—yet what he most desires, and what eludes him, is love.
Here is PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter's dazzling, sometimes devastating portrait of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
Copies
No copies available.
Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
by James Salter, Robert Phelps
“[A] well-edited collection . . . More than friends and less than lovers, Salter and Phelps were literary soul mates.” ―Publishers Weekly
It was James Salter’s third novel, A Sport and a Pastime―together with his film Three and a script he had written for Downhill Racer―that in 1969 prompted Robert Phelps to write a letter of admiration. Though the two writers didn’t know each other, their correspondence went on to span decades.
The letters themselves are exceptionally alive, uninhibited, gossipy, touching, and brilliant. The successes of Salter and the struggles of Phelps are fully explored by the writers themselves in the kind of honest exchange only letters can divulge. With an insightful foreword by Michael Dirda, this book gives voice to a nearly forgotten figure and his friendship with a man he admired.
Copies
No copies available.
Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
by James Salter, Robert Phelps
“[A] well-edited collection . . . More than friends and less than lovers, Salter and Phelps were literary soul mates.” ―Publishers Weekly
It was James Salter’s third novel, A Sport and a Pastime―together with his film Three and a script he had written for Downhill Racer―that in 1969 prompted Robert Phelps to write a letter of admiration. Though the two writers didn’t know each other, their correspondence went on to span decades.
The letters themselves are exceptionally alive, uninhibited, gossipy, touching, and brilliant. The successes of Salter and the struggles of Phelps are fully explored by the writers themselves in the kind of honest exchange only letters can divulge. With an insightful foreword by Michael Dirda, this book gives voice to a nearly forgotten figure and his friendship with a man he admired.
Copies
No copies available.
The Hunters
by Claire Messud, James Salter
From the acclaimed author of The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl, The Hunters is “a work of near-miraculous perfection” (Miranda Seymour, New York Times).
In two jewel-like novellas, Claire Messud explores isolation and the nature of love. “A Simple Tale” is the moving story of Maria Poniatowski, an aging Ukrainian woman who, after liberation from servitude to the Germans, struggles with a new life in Canada. What of the past is she able to preserve, without burdening her present? “The Hunters,” the second novella, tells the story of an American academic in London who grows obsessed with the neighbors downstairs. Loneliness breeds an active imagination, one that may be destructive.
Copies
No copies available.
The Hunters
by Claire Messud, James Salter
Captain Cleve Connell has already made a name for himself among pilots when he arrives in Korea during the war there to fly the newly operational F-86 fighters against the Soviet MIGs. His goal, like that of every fighter pilot, is to chalk up enough kills to become an ace.
But things do not turn out as expected. Mission after mission proves fruitless, and Connell finds his ability and his stomach for combat questioned by his fellow airmen: the brash wing commander, Imil; Captain Robey, an ace whose record is suspect; and finally, Lieutenant Pell, a cocky young pilot with an uncanny amount of skill and luck.
Disappointment and fear gradually erode Connell's faith in himself, and his dream of making ace seems to slip out of reach. Then suddenly, one dramatic mission above the Yalu River reveals the depth of his courage and honor.
Originally published in 1956, The Hunters was James Salter's first novel. Based on his own experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, it is a classic of wartime fiction. Now revised by the author and back in print on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Air Force, the story of Cleve Connell's war flies straight into the heart of men's rivalries and fears.
Copies
No copies available.
Don't Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles
by James Salter
"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.
Copies
No copies available.
Burning the Days: Recollection
by James Salter
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired.
Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women.
After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers—Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge.
Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer.
Only once in a long while—Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa—does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said “inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever”—a rare and unforgettable book.
Copies
No copies available.
Don't Save Anything Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles
by James Salter
"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.
Copies
No copies available.