Dusk and Other Stories

Published in 1988 and awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction the following year, James Salter's Dusk and Other Stories gathered the eleven short fictions that confirmed his standing as one of the finest American prose stylists of the late twentieth century. The collection moves with characteristic economy across landscapes both familiar to Salter and far afield - the horse country of the Hudson Valley, the cafés of Paris, the small towns of New England, an American expatriate's apartment in Rome, a hunting trip in the West - and turns its attention to the brief, irreversible moments by which a life is altered: a marriage that quietly fails, an affair that ends without warning, a friendship that does not survive a single misjudged remark. The title story, in which a divorced woman receives an unexpected visit from a former lover, is among the most admired short fictions of its decade, and the collection includes such often-anthologized pieces as "Akhnilo," "Foreign Shores," "American Express," and "Twenty Minutes." Throughout, Salter writes the spare, luminous prose - "a literature of glances and pauses," one critic called it - that draws on his early training as a fighter pilot and a screenwriter and that places him in the company of Chekhov, Babel, and Hemingway. Dusk remains the indispensable introduction to a writer whom Richard Ford, Susan Sontag, and a generation of younger novelists have regarded as a quiet master of the form.