James Salter Libros

In this brilliant recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events over fifty years, capturing an entire era through a singular sensibility. Scenes of love, desire, friendship, and ambition are rendered in the unique style for which James Salter is admired. The narrative begins with a Manhattan boyhood, fulfilling his father's wishes by graduating from West Point and serving as a pilot in the Air Force. Salter evokes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, balanced by haunting reflections on love and a young man's passion for women. After resigning from the Air Force, he embarks on a second life as a writer in 1960s New York, where the allure of film draws him in. Vivid portraits of actors, directors, and influential writers, like Irwin Shaw, populate his journey. Ultimately, this memoir illuminates manhood and the writing process, standing alongside works like Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Dinesen's Out of Africa. Unconventionally structured, it is a stunning achievement that The Washington Post Book World praises as inhabiting rarefied heights alongside literary greats—a rare and unforgettable exploration of life and creativity.

From his first published story in the Paris Review in 1968, James Salter's stories have been universally acclaimed. Including his two published collections, Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and Last Night (2005), and the previously uncollected 'Charisma', this volume contains over twenty short stories by one of the finest writers of our time. Concerning men and women in their most intimate moments, struggling with loss, desire, or the burden of memory, each indelible narrative in the Collected Stories is marked by James Salter's great literary grace, his ability to show the subtleties of a character or situation with precision, and his equally assured ability to command reversals of fortune or shocking revelations.

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.

4 hrs and 50 mins This short-story collection won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award for James Salter, author of Solo Faces and A Sport and A Pastime. Here, Salter's themes are memory and loss, the demands of honor and the inherent betrayals of sexual relations. Salter works like a miniaturist, evoking vast landscapes in a few lines: "Nothing is safe except for an hour," he writes in one beautiful story, opening up a whole world-view. Often, at the end of a story that runs only a few pages, the perspective suddenly broadens, the prose elevates to an abstract lyricism, and the reader is transported. 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.

Viri and Nedra Berland live a gilded life with their two daughters in upstate New York. But as the years roll by, the cracks in their marriage become crevasses. It seems that in testing the very limits of their happiness, Nedra and Vira are compelled to destroy it.

Vernon Rand, a mountaineer, abruptly leaves his job and wife to climb in the Alps. He and his friend Cabot attempt to scale the North Face of the Dru, but disaster strikes when Cabot falls and is left paralyzed. Rand struggles to accept this and dedicates himself to healing his friend, both physically and mentally.

The seductive classic that established Salter's reputation as one of the finest prose stylists of our time

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.

" Last Night is a collection of stories about passion - by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating." In ten 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, a translator, tormented by an agonizing sense of inevitability, assists in his wife's suicide even as he performs a last betrayal.