Light Years

“Extraordinary . . . at once tender, exultant, unabashedly sexual, sensual, and profoundly sad. Light Years is a masterpiece.”
—Elizabeth Benedict, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Remarkable. . . . Salter celebrates the silver-and-golden bitterness of life. Light Years . . . becomes an unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time.”
—James Wolcott, Esquire

“[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic.”
—Bloomsbury Review

“An absolutely beautiful, monstrous, important book.”
—Joy Williams

“Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring.”
—Lauren Groff
“For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years…. As a writer, I am shamelessly in its debt.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Paris Review
“Light Years, for its relative compactness, is, like all great works of fiction, no easy novel to sum up, so nuanced is its view of human beings, so rich and varied its fictive effects, so large its intention.”
—Richard Ford, from his Introduction
“Every time I read [James Salter’s] work I feel a kindred spirit there and am convinced all over again that the way we write a sentence can be everything: exploration, devotion, celebration.”
—George Saunders, The Southampton Review