Volume 52, Number 12 · July 14, 2005
The Great Heap of Days
By Joyce Carol Oates
Last Night
by James Salter
Knopf, 132 pp., $20.00
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Dusk and Other Stories
by James Salter
North Point, 157 pp. (out of print)
Light Years
by James Salter
Vintage, 308 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Burning the Days: Recollection
by James Salter
Vintage, 387 pp., $15.00 (paper)
A Sport and a Pastime
by James Salter
North Point, 191 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Solo Faces
by James Salter
North Point, 218 pp., $13.00 (paper)
The Hunters
by James Salter
Vintage, 233 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Gods of Tin: The Flying Years
by James Salter, edited and with an introduction by Jessica Benton and William Benton
Shoemaker and Hoard, 150 pp., $24.00
Born in 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, a graduate of West Point, and a fighter pilot in the Korean War, James Salter is the author of a relatively small body of prose of uncommon subtlety, intelligence, and beauty. Especially in his deftly rendered shorter fiction, gathered in Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and now Last Night, as in the remarkable Light Years (1975), Salter suggests not the heavy hitters of his era—James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Robert Penn Warren, John O'Hara, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Saul Bellow, for whom prose fiction is an arena for sinewy self-display and argumentation—but such European sensibilities as Proust, Colette, Woolf, Nabokov, Marguerite Duras.
Review, 4026 words
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