'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 He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently -- Susan Sontag