Light Years

Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little money, until stopping for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, where he meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a young shop assistant. She quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and an object of pure longing. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent.

Beautiful and haunting, is one of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire and the yearning for passion free of guilt and shame.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Salter including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

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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.

A literary event—a major new novel, his first work of fiction in seven years, from the universally acclaimed master and PEN/Faulkner winner: a sweeping, seductive love story set in post-World War II America that tells of one man’s great passions and regrets over the course of his lifetime.

From his experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It is a time when publishing is still largely a private affair—a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe—a time of gatherings in fabled apartments and conversations that continue long into the night. In this world of dinners, deals, and literary careers, Bowman finds that he fits in perfectly. But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, and finally he meets a woman who enthralls him—before setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.

Romantic and haunting, explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. It is a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.

This brilliant memoir brings to life an entire era through the sensibility of one of America's finest authors. Recollecting fifty years of love, desire and friendship, traces the life of a singular man, who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before reinventing himself as a writer in the New York of the 1960s.

It features — in Salter's uniquely beautiful style — some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who influenced him. This is a book that through its sheer sensual force not only recollects the past, but reclaims it.

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 , 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 result, , is a masterpiece.