Last Night [Paperback]

James Salter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 2006

Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. These ten powerful stories portray men and women in their most intimate moments. A lover of poetry is asked by his wife to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. A book dealer is forced to face the truth about his life. And in the title story, a translator assists his wife’s suicide, even as he performs a last act of betrayal. James Salter’s assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most essential writers

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Teetering marriages, collapsing relationships and other calamities of the heart drive these 10 compact, unsettling stories by respected writer Salter (A Sport and a Pastime, etc.). The title story is especially impressive—when Walter Much and his seriously ill wife, Marit, agree that he will assist in her suicide, Marit insists that Susanna, a mutual friend, come over to keep them company in her final moments. Nothing goes as planned, however, and Walter's double betrayal of his wife ushers in the haunting conclusion. The reunion stories are equally compelling: in "Palm Court," a man who initially failed to marry the love of his life meets her years later after her divorce only to find himself overwhelmed and distraught by the mixed feelings she rouses in him. "Bangkok" offers a different take on the reunion angle, as a woman tries to tempt an old flame into joining her and her female traveling companion on a sexually adventurous, last-second trip to the Far East, despite his being happily married and claiming to be satisfied with his sedate, settled life. The reserved, elegiac nature of Salter's prose and his mannered, well-bred characters lend the collection a distanced tone, but at their best these are stirring stories, worthy additions to a formidable body of work.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics call novelist and short-story writer Salter a writer’s writer. These stories (some previously published in Esquire and The New Yorker) also confirm that he’s "a reader’s writer" in his exploration of universal themes (Rocky Mountain News). Reviewers unanimously applaud Salter’s gleaming, precise prose and haunting retrospection, which reinforce complex and sophisticated characters and themes. "You can practically smell the cigarette smoke and hear the booze-scratched timbre of Salter’s characters’ voices," notes the San Francisco Chronicle. Despite his characters’ dubious exploits—they drink, sin, and tempt others—they occupy an emotional, ambiguous middle ground. A few stories seem truncated, and various points of view within individual stories caused some confusion. But Last Night is as good as any place to start to appreciate Salter’s genius.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (March 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400078415
• ISBN-13: 978-1400078417
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite sentences that drop like coins, February 7, 2006

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Last Night (Hardcover)

You could say about this collection: "These aren't stories, they're sketches." And you'd have a point. But the thing about Salter is that he shows you only what's needed, then invites you to imagine the rest. This was true in his 1967 novel, A Sport and a Pastime. Almost 40 years later, it still is. When I think of Salter, I'm reminded of John Updike's remark, "A psychoanalyst talking is like playing golf on the moon --- even a chip shot carries for miles." Salter hits chip shots.

Many will find this writing overly mannered. Yes, there are crumpled napkins on tables uncleared from last night's dinner party: "glasses still with dark remnant on them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie." Privileged women pine for love -- or sex. At a man's funeral, there are women the widow has never seen before. A married man is having an affair with a male friend. A hill is made from a pile of junked cars. A romantic opportunity is missed.

Salter is too discreet to shove the engine room of life into our faces, but it's very much there. One story ends with a woman dying of cancer --- a young woman. Another focuses on an older woman on what is to be the final night of her life: "She had a face now that was for the afterlife and those she would meet there." The sentences drop, regular as coins. Salter's cadences are so hypnotic it's easy to miss them. But they are arrows to the real subject of these stories, which are, like the best stories about adult men and women, about honor and love in the face of death.

"Last Night." 132 pages. Ten stories. They may read like trifles, like exercises, like parlor tricks --- but you can't forget them. Could it be because they are small masterpieces?

43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A reader's writer, May 5, 2005

By 

Dangle's girl (Astoria, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Night (Hardcover)

Perhaps somewhere out there in America there are people who live like characters in James Salter novels, but I sincerely hope not. These are unpleasant, haunted and pathological people, and it is Salter's genius that you not only want to spend time with these sociopaths, but want to take them home, hand them a few drinks and listen to them talk. Salter's gift is as adamantine as ever in "Last Night," but unlike in his earlier classics like "Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years," the erotic edge has been dulled by age and regret. None of the stories has an obvious beginning, end or `dramatic arc,' and the collection is much more interesting for that. Highly recommended for anyone who has stopped believing in happy endings.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Stories, June 1, 2005

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Last Night (Hardcover)

These ten stories are simply perfect and therefore pretty much impossible to describe. From "Last Night" with its beautifully ambiguous title, the first story I read, to "Platinum," the last one I read, there is not one superfluous word in Mr. Salter's elegant prose. He can describe a person or place with a word or two; or when he's being long-winded, he may need a complete sentence. A retarded six-year old swimming in a pond has an anxious face "above the surface like a dog's." A dog is simply "yellow-eyed." A woman who is past 40 had "only her personality and good nature by that time, the rest, as she herself would say, had turned into a size fourteen." Another woman's only fault is that she didn't like to cook. "She couldn't cook and talk at the same time." Although many of Mr. Salter's characters are upper middleclass, they don't appear to be much better off than the rest of us. They just meet in nicer hotels to commit their adulteries. Some of them lead lives of quiet desperation. Mr. Salter is also the master of understated irony. For example, in "Last Night," arguably the best story in this small collection, a terminally ill woman plans her suicide with assistance from her husband and invites a young woman, "a family friend," to dine with her and her husband for her last supper. This quiet little story, as Garrison Keillor would say, will blow your head off.

Short stories do not get better than these.