A Sport and a Pastime

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.

Author Information

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.