Collected Stories

Reviews / Votes

'It's the short stories which make him one of the greatest writers of the last century and the present one, up there with Carver and Cheever, the mind-blowing Lydia Davis - who has just won the Man Booker International Prize - and the Fitzgerald of Babylon Revisited. Republished this month, the strongest of Salter's stories are shadowy and sinister with a whiff of his two favourite perfumes, sex and death, hanging over the scarifying prose . . . What makes the short stories perfect are the fully-mastered qualities . . . 'style, structure and authority.'' Financial Times One of the finest American writers of his mighty generation * Esquire * James Salter's writing has always provoked in me a kind of evangelical admiration. It is sheer brute magic. His prose is exquisite, sentences created with such acuity and efficacy it seems he re-forges language itself, makes it more purposeful and beautiful * Sarah Hall * Robert Frost said that the hope of any poet is to lodge a few poems so deep they couldn't be dislodged, and James Salter has done that again and again. He has become an indelible presence in our literature -- Tobias Wolff * Observer * It isn't Salter's language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first -- James Meek * London Review of Books * Books that are, quite simply, life-changingly good * Dazed & Confused * A stylist, a purist, a guy who really socks it to you, however elegantly * Observer * Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence -- Michael Dirda * Washington Post * James Salter can suggest in a single sentence an individual's entire history -- Michiko Kakutani * New York Times * There is scarcely a writer alive who could not learn from his passion and precision of language -- Peter Matthiessen Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master -- Richard Ford Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently -- Susan Sontag