James Salter - Light Years

“Admirers of James Salter’s fiction speak of it reverently, with delicacy, almost in awe. He writes about the fragility of things—families, love, sexuality, success—in prose that is as careful and light as a structure made of eggshells.”

“Salter inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O’Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever.”

“This novel—explicitly moody, tender, elegiac—details the disintegration of a love and the unraveling of a well-knit life by the hearth…. What finally emerges is a narrative that is more thrilling than its cadences, its descriptive felicities or evocations of character. It is the sense we get, in places almost overpowering, that its real protagonist is time.”

“Salter is that rare writer who takes us inside worlds we may never be able to experience firsthand.”

“Salter is an ultimately modern writer [whose] prose style is simultaneously terse and elegant, with alternately hectic and hypnotic rhythms. The images he uses are complicated and sometimes oblique. [Salter] observes accurately and intensely.”

“Brilliant… moving [and] full of truth.”

“Among contemporary novelists, I can think of none who has written a novel more beautiful than Light Years . One must take care to read this book as slowly as possible, ruefully foreseeing that it will end. In our minds it will be a nourishing presence always like To the Lighthouse, Tender Is the Night, A Lost Lady— a presence that we will have a hard time imagining our once having had to live without.”

An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

“Gorgeously written… a tour de force.”

Winner of the Booker Prize

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Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

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This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”

“The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century… the classic representation of American black experience.”

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A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

“One of the best books of the year.”

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At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

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This masterpiece is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. As Thomas Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline, he creates a world of exuberant vitality and almost Rabelaisian earthiness.

“Wonderfully fresh and elegant… bound to become the definitive English version.”

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The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

“The only convincing love story of our century.”

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During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven.

“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”

Winner of the Booker Prize

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In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

“A diabolically clever, engaging work…the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”

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AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, OR CALL TOLL-FREE TO ORDER: 1-800-793-2665 (CREDIT CARDS ONLY).

First Vintage International Edition, February 1995

Copyright © 1975 by James Salter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of

Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1975.

Salter James.

Light Years.

I. Title

PZ4.S177L13 [PS3569.A4622] 813′.5′4 74-29594

eISBN: 978-0-307-78172-7

Author photograph © Sally Gall

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