50
Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books
Cart |
|  my account  |  wish list  |  help   |  800-878-7323
Hello, | Login
MENU
  • Browse
    • New Arrivals
    • Bestsellers
    • Featured Preorders
    • Award Winners
    • Audio Books
    • See All Subjects
  • Used
  • Staff Picks
    • Staff Picks
    • Picks of the Month
    • 50 Books for 50 Years
    • 25 Best 21st Century Sci-Fi & Fantasy
    • 25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books From the 21st Century
    • 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Women to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books to Read Before You Die
  • Gifts
    • Gift Cards & eGift Cards
    • Powell's Souvenirs
    • Journals and Notebooks
    • socks
    • Games
  • Sell Books
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Find A Store

Don't Miss

  • Powell's Essential List: 25 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
  • Powell's Author Events
  • Oregon Battle of the Books
  • Audio Books

Visit Our Stores


Keith Mosman: Powell's Picks Spotlight: Sidik Fofana's 'Stories from The Tenants Downstairs' (0 comment)
I was a theatre major, and like most theatre majors, I: 1. Insist on spelling “theatre” with an “re” and 2. Don’t actually make theatre any more (and even seeing any plays in performance during the last few years has been a challenge for well-documented, world-historical reasons)...
Read More»
  • Kelsey Ford: Women Translating Women: 8 Translators to Read for Women in Translation Month (0 comment)
  • Michelle Carroll: What We're Watching: The Threequel (0 comment)
  • Michelle Carroll: What We're Watching: The Threequel (0 comment)

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##

Sport & a Pastime

by James Salter
Sport & a Pastime

  • Comment on this title
  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780374530501
ISBN10: 0374530505
Condition: Standard


All Product Details

View Larger ImageView Larger Images
Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$8.50
List Price:$17.00
Used Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
1Local Warehouse

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years.

Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story — part shocking reality, part feverish dream — of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen — and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

Review

"Salter inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever." The Washington Post Book World

Review

"A feverishly compressed, exquisitely controlled story." Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

Review

"A tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliff-hanger; an opaline vision of Americans in France....A Sport and a Pastime succeeds as art must. It tells us about ourselves." The New York Times Book Review

Review

"Salter particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure." Susan Sontag

Review

"The encounters of Dean and Anne-Marie seem not to require reading but sensing, as if the touch of the eye were almost too much for reality. And when at last the dream breaks, it is not with a shatter but a silent splintering of crystal fragments." Time

Synopsis

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story--part shocking reality, part feverish dream --of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen--and pages that burn with a rare intensity.


About the Author

James Salter was born in New Jersey in 1926 and is the author of The Hunters, The Arm of Flesh, Solo Faces, Light Years, Dusk and Other Stories, and a memoir, Burning the Days. He lives in Aspen, Colorado, and Long Island, New York.


4.5 2

What Our Readers Are Saying

Share your thoughts on this title!
Average customer rating 4.5 (2 comments)

`
SMOak , July 27, 2015 (view all comments by SMOak)
I checked out A Sport and a Pastime shortly after reading the obit for James Salter in the NY Times. I was hooked by the first chapter, where Salter's description of a simple train ride in the French provinces blew me away. His writing has that type of visceral power. If you know anything about this novel, you might have heard that its frank depiction of sex was scandalous when it came out in 1967. It is not, however, a highbrow Fifty Shades. If anything, the desperate coupling of the protagonist and his young French lover brought to mind for me the first two of the Buddha's Four Noble Truth's--all phenomena and experiences are dissatisfying and that dissatisfaction results from our clinging to what is pleasurable and our aversion to what is not. Don't worry, though, Salter doesn't teach the path to enlightenment. He just plunges you into the ecstasy and misery of being alive.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

report this comment

`
lukas , May 27, 2015 (view all comments by lukas)
"The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist." Released in 1967, James Salter's "A Sport and a Pastime," which has become something of a cult novel, doesn't seem to fit in with the Summer of Love ethos of its time. While it partakes of some of the boho free-spiritedness of the Beats and Henry Miller's raw sexuality, it also is a more crafted, poignant work in which the sex and the freedom aspects are tinged with a Fitzgerald-like melancholy. The story is simple: an American college dropout has an intense, passionate affair with a French girl. The book doesn't even run 200 pages and I think benefits from being read in a single day. Will appeal to fans of Cheever, Richard Yates, and Fred Exley. Reynolds Price, in the introduction, called it "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know." The title comes from the Koran: "Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime. . ."

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

report this comment




Product Details

ISBN:
9780374530501
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
08/22/2006
Publisher:
FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX
Series info:
FSG Classics
Pages:
208
Height:
.55IN
Width:
5.54IN
Thickness:
.25
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
2006
UPC Code:
2800374530503
Author:
Reynolds Price
Author:
Reynolds Price
Author:
James Salter
Author:
Reynolds Price
Author:
James Salter
Subject:
Americans
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Americans -- France.

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$8.50
List Price:$17.00
Used Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
1Local Warehouse

More copies of this ISBN

  • New, Trade Paperback, Starting from $16.00
  • Used, Trade Paperback, Starting from $5.95

This title in other editions

  • Used, Trade Paperback, $8.95
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram

  • Help
  • Guarantee
  • My Account
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Security
  • Wish List
  • Partners
  • Contact Us
  • Shipping
  • Sitemap
  • © 2022 POWELLS.COM Terms

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##