jock librarian

The characters in James Salter's Last Night stand like carefully rendered Hopper figures--lonely men and women desperately searching for an authentic life. A man is chided for being "oblivious to the wreckage" of his first marriage. A wife finds herself competing for her husband's attention. And in the story "Bangkok," when two former lovers revisit their past, one tries to dismiss the "phantom skip" of his heart. Written with such an economy of words, Salter's spare and startling stories read like urgent messages from the front.