I should preface this by saying that I���m not typically a big fan of contemporary short stories: I���m certainly not one to go in for many of the often formulaic and derivative New Yorker style pieces that seem to abound in just about every magazine and collection���often the very ones that get praised so highly. I���m much more interested in short stories that work well, and I���ve found that this is only the case for those who pioneered the form and who were masters at it: Poe, James, Mansfield, Borges, and company. However, I am trying to make an effort in 2013 to read more short stories, so I picked up Salter���s only short story collection today.

������Imagine my surprise: me, a reader who prefers novels, besotted by the only short story collection this man wrote. I���m not even sure what Salter does that is so bewitching: his prose is simplistic; his sentences tend to be laconic and terse. But he does very intriguing things with temporality, and he���s able to move adroitly from one character���s perspective to another���s without leaving the reader feeling jarred or causing his narrative to flounder. There is also a skill evident here when it comes to shifting levels of consciousness and memory���for example, in ���Twenty Minutes,��� a woman who has been thrown from her horse, and knowing she has twenty minutes before shock gives way to full-blown pain, relives the most pressing memories in her life in a nonlinear fashion that isn���t Salter writing stream-of-consciousness so much as him proving to be incisive in getting at people���s various states of psychological unrest and feelings of loneliness.

This is also a wide-ranging collection: the title story is one of the strongest���so it���s no surprise that the collection is named after it���and deals with the static life of a woman turned forty-nine, her regrets and her conflicted ways of dealing with those in her every day life; one piece looks at the levels of camaraderie, resentment, and jealousy in our adult relationships as they are formed in early life by focusing on a reunion at West Point; and another story offers an hallucinatory midnight stroll through the suburbs as a man who is a recovering alcoholic either falls off the wagon or, and Salter is really superb in this piece (���Akhnilo���), is completely sober.

I���ve reached the ten-minute deadline I give myself for most reviews on here, but I don���t yet feel that I���ve been able to convey just how Salter���s prose struck me here���nor can I attempt to describe just what he does. But whatever he does, he does remarkably well and with such grace and ease that it���s a marvel the complex depths he plumbs here. ( )

Salter was a pilot before he was a writer, and his style seems to retain the movement and economy of flying. He prefers to flit across a room, a city, or a person than to describe it in detail--he opens one story this way: "Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea." A club is described this way: "Unknown brilliant faces jammed at the bar. The dark, dramatic eye that blazes for a moment and disappears."

One is immediately impressed by Salter's lyricism and vitality, but begins to tire after 20 pages of evasive maneuvers. One wishes Salter would just spend a full paragraph or two describing a scene, or lingering at the expression on someone's face. The stories are "artsy," minimal, and sensual and therefore suit the European setting well--they seem to fit into one's idea of a European sensibility. The stories are never named too specifically--but only make sense at some indirect or meta level.

Salter's short story style seems much more experimental than someone like John Cheever--though a blurb on the back cover puts him in the same camp. In the introduction, Philip Gourevitch touches on this, putting it nicely: that Salter "seems prepared to allow himself anything," and that he "continuously refreshes the short story form." Though some stories shine, other stories may have benefitted from a more traditional treatment. ( )

A lot of James Salters work seem to be stories about the tough, independent manly man. But they have a wonderful dark melancholy to them that makes them worth reading.
The short stories in this collection tended to the vague and dreamy as well. Not sure what I've got from it, but it was an enjoyable read. ( )

not as good as Last Night. ( )

Although I can see, intellectually, that James Salter is a talented writer, these stories failed to touch me emotionally or creatively.

Salter is very much a writer of moods - indeed, each of these pieces is like a different slice of atmospheric moodiness, usually melancholy, uncertain, searching for a resolution that never really comes.

He is also a writer of complex thoughts, and these are the moments that I liked best in his work. These are represented in the passages where we delve deeply in the thoughts and delusions of a character, often into ideas that are unsociable or even taboo.

Take this description of the character Malcolm in the opening story of the collection:

"Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of that great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius. An artist freed from the demands of craft, an artist of concepts, generosity, his work is the creation of the legend of himself. So long as he is provided with even a single follower he can believe in the sanctity of this design."

That is a brilliant observation, one that flirts with artistic narcissism and simultaneously deflates it. These are the gems to be found scattered throughout the stories in this book.

Unfortunately for me, these moments of lucid insight are not enough. I want story, man! Salter falters seriously in this respect, as we drift into the lives of his characters, see into their complexity, and then abruptly drop out again. There is not a story here that doesn't follow this exact pattern.

Look, I get it. There is a trend in American short story writing of this period that savors this type of writing. It's straight out of the Raymond Carver playbook.

But me, I want narrative, story, drive, conflict and resolution! It's there in so many other great American short story writers - yes, Poe, Hawthorne, James, all the classics. But it is also there in relative contemporaries such as O'Connor, Updike, even Cheever, to whom Salter is sometimes compared. Without that element to give the underlying ideas a bit of spice and coherence, this kind of storytelling is just not my cup of tea. ( )

James Salter's collection has three stories I absolutely hated, four stories I thought were fantastic, and four I'm still trying to figure out. That being the case I've eschewed my star rating. It seemed prudent. Salter does an excellent job of distillation with economy of language and time in this collection. In "American Express" years drift by as quickly as minutes in other narratives. This was, perhaps, my least favorite story but the technique is still well developed. Yet, even as I write this I'm consider whether it was actually a well developed deployment of a narrative technique or just really god-damned confusing. My deep emotional response makes me curious to reread.

Vintage Salter, short and bitter with jabbing prose. ( )

Sadly, I only discovered James Salter recently, after reading his obituary. His popularity among other writers doesn't surprise me. The prose in this collection of short stories dazzles. Salter has a way of juxtaposing a flurry of images within the space of a paragraph while only supplying just enough information to allow the reader's progress through the narrative. A lot of the characters in this particular collection seem to be women resolved to their bitterness - failed lives or living failures. When I was most engaged, as with the story Dirt (my favorite of the bunch) he conveys his metaphors without writing them on the nose. They appear once the story has finished, there all along. These are stories demanding to be read again. You need their endings to appreciate their beginnings, which is one of the reasons I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of Salter before.

There were moments reading these stories when the prose slipped over the page like a double layer of velum. The imagery is precise but erratic. Eventually, the sentences amount to an incredible shape of story but the process, particularly the first read, can be disorienting. It wouldn't be fair to call Salter's prose arduous, his project is more satisfying than that, rather, while reading I often had the experience of losing my engagement - my eyes scanned over the words while my mind wandered and when I "awoke" I had to go back and find the sentence where I derailed in order to start again. I had that experience with these stories too many times to be coincidental.

I am intrigued enough to pursue more Salter. I look forward to trying one of his novels, where his thoughts can have a little more room to stretch, and where I might be able to find his rhythm, as a reader, more easily. ( )

Sadly, I only discovered James Salter recently, after reading his obituary. His popularity among other writers doesn't surprise me. The prose in this collection of short stories dazzles. Salter has a way of juxtaposing a flurry of images within the space of a paragraph while only supplying just enough information to allow the reader's progress through the narrative. A lot of the characters in this particular collection seem to be women resolved to their bitterness - failed lives or living failures. When I was most engaged, as with the story Dirt (my favorite of the bunch) he conveys his metaphors without writing them on the nose. They appear once the story has finished, there all along. These are stories demanding to be read again. You need their endings to appreciate their beginnings, which is one of the reasons I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of Salter before.

There were moments reading these stories when the prose slipped over the page like a double layer of velum. The imagery is precise but erratic. Eventually, the sentences amount to an incredible shape of story but the process, particularly the first read, can be disorienting. It wouldn't be fair to call Salter's prose arduous, his project is more satisfying than that, rather, while reading I often had the experience of losing my engagement - my eyes scanned over the words while my mind wandered and when I "awoke" I had to go back and find the sentence where I derailed in order to start again. I had that experience with these stories too many times to be coincidental.

I am intrigued enough to pursue more Salter. I look forward to trying one of his novels, where his thoughts can have a little more room to stretch, and where I might be able to find his rhythm, as a reader, more easily. ( )

Dusk is the time of day when light turns to dark, making it the point when a person’s perspective begins to shift. This becomes an apt metaphor for the 11 stories contained in Dusk by James Salter, a writer better known for his long-form fiction. While each of the brief tales in this volume is set in a different locale and expressed from a disparate point of view, they all share the common theme of someone facing a change in the status quo, whether that adjustment is a shift in fortune or a different phase of life. For instance, in “American Express”, two young New York-based lawyers come into sudden wealth and find themselves on a morally bankrupt tour of Europe. In “Twenty Minutes”, we experience the agonizing end to the life of a woman in a failed marriage who has been in a horse-riding accident. “Via Negativa” tells the story of an underachieving writer who, in a fit of jealous rage, loses control and destroys what is perhaps the only redeeming relationship in his life. And so on.

I find myself quite torn over how to evaluate this book. Above all else, I found the author’s prose to be consistently strong and, on occasion, simply amazing. Salter is often likened to Ernest Hemingway for his terse, compact style and that comparison is well-supported by the work in Dusk. There is also an ethereal quality to some of his writing—“Akhnilo”, one of the strongest stories in the volume, is a case in point—that both misdirects and mystifies the reader to great effect. On the other hand, I did not really like many of the stories themselves, replete as they were unlikeable characters often doing unpleasant or sorrowful things. In fact, with the possible exception of an au pair in “Foreign Shores” or an overlooked reunion attendee in “Lost Sons”, Salter does not create any protagonists that really evoke one’s sympathy. So, while there is much to admire about Salter’s talent as a wordsmith, the collection itself is quite uneven with too many stories that left me with an unsatisfied feeling. ( )

I found the writing oblique and often non-descriptive. None of these stories really engaged my interest. ( )