New Releases by James Salter

Verhalen over het verlangen naar echte liefde en de onmogelijkheid om hierover te communiceren.

Auf den ersten Blick ist es paradiesisch: Das privilegierte Leben von Viri und Nedra kreist um Dinnerpartys und Freunde, um einen sonnendurchfluteten Garten, um endlose Ferien am Atlantik mit den Kindern. Doch langsam entblättert sich das Trügerische dieser Idylle: Viri beginnt eine Affäre mit einer jungen Mitarbeiterin, Nedra trifft sich mit einem langjährigen Freund der Familie. In poetischen Bildern führt James Salter uns vor Augen, dass nichts unerbittlicher ist als Zeit und nichts vergänglicher als Glück.

In June, 2006, Picador launch Picador Shots, a new series of pocket-sized books priced at £1. The Shots aim to promote the short story as well as the work of some Picador''s greatest authors. They will be contemporarily packaged but ultimately disposable books that are the ideal literary alternative to a magazine. In these two stories, James Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. In ''My Lord You'' 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. In ''Last Night'', an ageing but successful business men meets up with a woman he has loved and lost twenty years later only to find himself reacting in a way he would never have imagined… ''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 He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently'' Susan Sontag ''Salter''s prose is rare and stunning'' John Irving ''James Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and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 Book World

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.

A collection of two dozen essays and sketches shares the author''s experiences as a passionate traveler, in a volume based on his twenty years of skiing, hiking, and climbing in such nations as Japan, Switzerland, and Germany.

"Focuses on the lives of officers in an Air Force squadron incold war Europe and their response to bright and ambitious newcomers. Two planes unable to land from a training mission become the striking focal point of the story."--Jacket.

Die Träume der Jugend sind ausgeträumt, die Hoffnungen haben sich nicht erfüllt. Nach gescheiterten Ehen und verlorenen Freundschaften erleben die Helden dieser Erzählungen, weisse Amerikaner mittleren Alters, die Melancholie der Einsamkeit, die Unerbittlichkeit der verrinnenden Zeit, die unabwendbaren Verluste. Auch das alte Europa mit seiner Kultur und Beständigkeit bietet den am Leben Gescheiterten keine Zuflucht - es bleibt kalt und fremd. Trotzdem ist Salters Prosa nicht düster. Sie verzaubert durch Sprache, die fast zu schön, zu artifiziell ist, durch Metaphern, in die man sich verlieben kann.

A brilliant portrait of a marriage from the PEN/Faulkner Award-winner and author of A Sport and a Pastime, with an introduction by Richard Ford. “Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring.”—Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies “Remarkable. An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time.”—James Wolcott, Esquire “[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic.”—Bloomsbury Review Nedra and Viri''s favored life revolves around delightful dinners, imaginative games with their children, enviable friends, and idyllic days spent skating on a frozen river or basking in the sun on the beach. But even as Salter lingers over the surface of their marriage, he 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.

Salter chronicles a love affair between a young shopgirl and an American college dropout against the backdrop of provincial France.

"A lone bather drifts placidly in a crystalline pool. A field of sunflowers bows beneath a sky threatening rain. A long, gleaming wave curves across the surface of a dark lake. At water''s edge, the sensuality of immersion, the tactility of water, and the transparency of air combine visually to create an otherworldly terrain, an eerie paradise where nature and dreams meet." "Superb compositions that capture and enhance the ever-changing play of light, water, and land, these ethereal images by photographer Sally Gall are at once ominous and serene, disturbing and reassuring. Suddenly we are made aware of the unconscious that lies just below the unrippled veneer, a storehouse of repressed desires - nature empowered with a soul." "In an eloquent introduction, writer James Salter explores the relationship between the photographer and her subject, as well as the mystery, the longing, and the trepidation that these photographs inevitably conjure up for the viewer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

Contains miscellaneous periodical issues in which the author''s works appeared.