Last Night: Stories

The American writer James Salter, now 81, has been given the signal honour of having four of his books reissued at the same time - by two publishers. In addition, a new collection of short stories is being published in paperback for the first time. Such joint publishing ventures are rare, but in Salter's case it proves how highly both Picador and Penguin feel about his writing. It should also bring his work to a new generation of readers.

Salter (born James Horowitz in 1925) grew up in New York. His father, who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, sent James to West Point, the famous military school. After graduating, he underwent further training with the US Air Force, and was sent to Korea, where he flew jet fighters. He was subsequently posted to bases in Germany and the United States, finally taking the momentous decision to leave the air force and concentrate on his writing.

It was a huge wrench - 'a strange, bottomless reaction set in', as Salter wrote in his memoir Burning the Days - but he adjusted. He continued flying at weekends for the National Guard, and was posted to France in 1961 as a reservist during the Berlin crisis. This proved for Salter to be 'the close of things' - the genuineness had gone, and he was set free from military life: 'All that before had been insignificant, unmartial, caught my eye'.

Salter had begun his first novel, The Hunters, while he was still in the air force (it is, not surprisingly, about an American fighter pilot in the Korean War). In both his fiction and non-fiction, he writes incomparably about how it feels to be a pilot: the missions, the speed, the terror, the boredom and the easy camaraderie. No wonder he found it difficult to resign his commission.

However, the year in France gave him the opportunity to begin working on something completely different: the story of an erotic love affair between a Yale dropout and a French shop girl, who tour France in his car. Several years later, back in the USA, these beginnings took shape, and became A Sport and a Pastime. Salter explains in Burning The Days that he had wanted to write something 'licentious yet pure … filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own, a book that would cling to one and could not be brushed away.'

In the way of books that subsequently gather to themselves a reputation, A Sport and a Pastime was turned down by many publishers before George Plimpton of the Paris Review agreed to take it. It sold a few thousand copies.

An alternative career as a screenwriter and journalist gave Salter access to literature, cinema and society's beautiful people; certainly the second half of Burning the Days is littered with references to the celebrities of America and Europe. But it is the novels that remain: Light Years, the dissection of a seemingly golden and urbane marriage going wrong; and Cassada (originally published as The Arm of Flesh), another air force story, this time set in Germany during the Cold War.

Salter's other great writing achievement is his felicity with short stories, the most recent of which are published in paperback in the UK for the first time this March. Like Light Years, Last Night's ten stories dig deep into relationships, revealing fissures and disappointments, and exposing the way in which optimism can be crushed over time. They are razor-sharp stories, deeply melancholy, and true.

'Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it is there.' Thus wrote Salter as Light Years began to take shape. Praised as a supreme stylist by many (including Richard Ford), his writing is masculine yet sensual, lyrical and vivid and spare.