A Sport and a Pastime

The astonishing novel and "tour de force" about a love affair in postwar France from the iconic author of All That Is ( The New York Times Book Review ). Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little money. When he stops for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, he meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a young shop assistant. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent, and she quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and an object of pure longing. James Salter, author of Light Years and the memoir Burning the Days, was an essential voice in the evolution of late twentieth-century prose, a stylist on par with John Updike and Philip Roth who won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection Dusk and Other Stories. One of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire free of guilt and shame, A Sport and a Pastime inspired Reynolds Price to call it "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know." "As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know." — The New York Times "Sentence for sentence, Salter is the master." —Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Ford "[A] hauntingly beautiful novel . . . Its spirit—the ache and artistry of Scott Fitzgerald filtered through the cool sensibility of Flaubert or James—evokes France, missed opportunities, all the fugitive beauty of youth." — The Washington Post This ebook edition features an illustrated biography of James Salter including rare photos from the author's personal collection.