A Sport and a Pastime: Picador Classic

(Paperback)

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Description

The seductive classic that established Salter's reputation as one of the finest prose stylists of our time. Touring Paris and provincial France in a handsome borrowed car, Philip Dean, Yale drop-out, has an affair with a young French woman named Anne-Marie. Their liaison is imagined with candour and sensitivity by an unnamed narrator, whose fantasies become compellingly and hauntingly real.A Sport and A Pastime has been hailed as a watershed in American fiction of the 1960s: remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to blur the boundaries of reality and dream life, daytime and night time, soul and flesh.

Reviews

A great literary novel but also the most erotic book ever written -- Jonathan Dee * Financial Times *
'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 * New York Times *
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 * Independent *
'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 * Esquire *
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 * Independent *
Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence * Washington Post *
A Sport and a Pastime is as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know -- Reynolds Price
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 *
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 * GQ *

Author Bio

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.