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The seductive classic that established Salter's reputation as one of the finest prose stylists of our time
A great literary novel but also the most erotic book ever written
'A Sport and a Pastime . . . Slender, cynical and bruisingly sexy, the novel represents the first full flowering of [Salter's] mature style; his exquisite sentences and extraordinary evocation of place. Daily Telegraph
'Now deemed canonical . . . A Sport and a Pastime [is] still one of the most intensely honest books about sexual passion.' Sunday Times
A tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliffhanger
He has written three books that everyone should read before they die: A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and his recollections, Burning the Days
'Two of his previous novels [including] A Sport and a Pastime, from 1967, are regarded as classics . . . The writer Reynolds Price also thought A Sport and a Pastime "perfect",' Irish Times
One of the finest American writers of his mighty generation
He has written three books that everyone should read before they die: A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years and his recollections, Burning the Days
Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence
A Sport and a Pastime is as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know
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
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
To read Salter's work is always to embark on a journey through a life lived - the beautiful and the colourless, the tragic and the sustaining . . . exceptional fiction that cuts to our most cherished and at times most private truths. Read him when you can, his novels about sex and flying and war and love - those moments that should outshine all others - and your own world, your own moments worth remembering will appear all the brighter for it
James Salter is the author of the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), The Hunters and All That Is; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; and two collections of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories (which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award), and Last Night. He died in 2015 at the age of ninety.