James Sallis

Two pieces of fiction, and two pieces of nonfiction. Authors: Nick Mamatas Steve Rasnic Tem Benjamin Whitmer James Sallis

James Sallis’ collection of five novellas. 'James Sallis is a superb writer ' - Times James Sallis’ World’s Edge presents five masterful novellas—Dayenu, Carriers, Settlers, Allotments, and Reconstruction—exploring fractured societies, human resilience, and the fragile intersections of morality and survival. Sallis’s prose, as sharp as it is evocative, captures the nuances of his dystopian and near-future settings, resonating with themes of dislocation and identity. Widely regarded as a pivotal voice in contemporary US fiction, Sallis’s work aligns with literary giants such as Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, weaving the poetic bleakness of the former with the incisive character studies of the latter. These stories draw readers into a world both intimate and unyielding, where existential questions lurk beneath stark, elegant narratives.

For the first time ever, the complete short fiction of literary legend James Sallis is collected in one gorgeous volume--a must-have holiday gift for the crime, mystery, or speculative fiction fan in your life. Published over the six decades of Sallis's storied career, the complete collection contains 154 stories, 11 of which are exclusive to this volume. James Sallis moves with ease among genres and modes: novels, stories, poetry, criticism, musicology, biography, translation. Best known perhaps as a crime writer--author of Drive and the six Lew Griffin novels along with others--his first acclaim came in the 1960s from groundbreaking short stories in science fiction publications like Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, for which he served for a time as editor, and Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. In years since, he's published eighteen novels, numerous collections of essays, six volumes of poetry, a landmark biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin, while writing widely about books for The New York Times, LA Times, The Washington Post, and for The Boston Globe, where he served as books columnist. He's received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Litt rature Polici re. Through it all, his interest in the short story has remained strong, with work appearing regularly in venues ranging from The Georgia Review to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Herein you'll find science fiction, comedy low and high, fantasy, crime stories, stories of everyday life: the realist, arealist, and surreal all together in a jumble, enjambed. Literature, Jim insists, is not a cabinet with labeled drawers, it's a banquet table. Stroll around, pick what you want from it all. What you need. Enjoy.

James Sallis's (Drive) seminal biographical essays on crime fiction pioneers Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes restored to print and joined by a handpicked collection of essays, reviews, and introductory writings on noir fiction. At the time of its original publication by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was a pioneering work of literary investigation. Sallis's subjects of Himes, Goodis, and Thompson were as enigmatic as they were out-of-print, and literary scholarship on the subject of their lives and works scant. As the title of the collection indicates, the three men led difficult lives, and although they forever changed the history of crime writing, they all passed in relative isolation. The literary detective work Sallis did then has been built upon since but rarely with the same poetry and authorial sympathy. Despite there now existing several works of academic and popular biography on each writer Sallis's novella-length biographies retain the sense of the newly uncovered. Those three pieces, "Jim Thompson: Dime-store Dosteoevski," "David Goodis: Life in Black and White," and "Chester Himes: America's Black Heartland" are prefigured by a new introduction by the author as well as the original introduction, "Portable Worlds: The First Paperback Novel." Following Difficult Lives is collection of reviews, essays and introductions, selected by Sallis, covering a wide range of crime fiction's most legendary authors and books: Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Boris Vian, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Paco Taibo, Shirley Jackson, and more.

WHAT YOU WERE FIGHTING FOR is a wonderful collection of short stories that provokes the mind with its weird and intriguing tales. We catch glimpses of worlds that are similar to our own, but always different enough to make you wonder and sit at the edge of your seat. Reading this collection you often have to work out what is truly happening as Sallis weaves his imaginative portrayals of idiosyncratic characters with all the subtlety of the mind that spawned the Lew Griffin novels, Willnot, Sarah Jane, and Drive.

For the first time ever, the complete short fiction of literary legend James Sallis is collected in one gorgeous volume--a must-have holiday gift for the crime, mystery, or speculative fiction fan in your life. Published over the six decades of Sallis's storied career, the complete collection contains 154 stories, 11 of which are exclusive to this volume. James Sallis moves with ease among genres and modes: novels, stories, poetry, criticism, musicology, biography, translation. Best known perhaps as a crime writer--author of Drive and the six Lew Griffin novels along with others--his first acclaim came in the 1960s from groundbreaking short stories in science fiction publications like Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, for which he served for a time as editor, and Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. In years since, he's published eighteen novels, numerous collections of essays, six volumes of poetry, a landmark biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin, while writing widely about books for The New York Times, LA Times, The Washington Post, and for The Boston Globe, where he served as books columnist. He's received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Litt rature Polici re. Through it all, his interest in the short story has remained strong, with work appearing regularly in venues ranging from The Georgia Review to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Herein you'll find science fiction, comedy low and high, fantasy, crime stories, stories of everyday life: the realist, arealist, and surreal all together in a jumble, enjambed. Literature, Jim insists, is not a cabinet with labeled drawers, it's a banquet table. Stroll around, pick what you want from it all. What you need. Enjoy.

Under the wise gaze of 'The Butterfly Witch' by Melissa Mary Duncan, this issue promises at least two sides to every story.Siblings work through past hurts and begin new journeys in 'Old Gifts' by feature author James Sallis and 'Can-on-a-String' by Alex Kitt. Meanwhile, zombies do double duty in 'Ambience' by Jason P Burnham and 'Caught Dead' by Shawn L Bird. We navigate new lands with Pete Barnstrom in 'Oeufs Dangereux' and Cheryl Skory Suma in 'Adrift off the Shore of Alzheimer Island'. And Anna Zumbro in 'The Dump 'Em Dog' and Mikael Lopez and Enrico Orlandi in 'Forgive My Delay' remind us that, no matter the world in which we live, breaking up is hard to do. Next, triple your literary delight with historical fiction: 'The Shepherdess: Grandm re Paris' by JM Landels, 'Pretty Lies: I Can See for Miles' by Mel Anastasiou, and 'Once Upon a Time in Camelot' by GD Litke. Three's the charm for poetry too, with our Magpie Award winners Cara Waterfall's 'griefbody' and 'Harvest' and Kevin Spenst's 'BigGermanDialectWordClankinglyInsertedHere '.

"A PERFECT PIECE OF NOIR FICTION" NEW YORK TIMES * NAMED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST & ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY"Drive is full of sly humor, poetic details and plenty of rude violence...The novel is a terrific ride." Los Angeles TimesI drive. That's what I do. All I do.Originally written in 2005, Drive by James Sallis is the inspiration for the iconic 2011 film starring Ryan Gosling in the role of the man known only as 'Driver', a Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night.The gritty back streets of Los Angeles are the backdrop for what the New York Times calls "a perfect piece of noir fiction" in which the Driver is double-crossed in a burglary gone horribly wrong. This beautiful new edition introduces a noir classic to a new generation of readers, featuring added materials, including a reading group guide and author Q&A.

A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive. Sarah Jane Pullman is a cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she's filling--and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends. This kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail--a virtuoso work by a master of both and the tender aspects of human nature.

Weaving Griffin's search for identity-one of the recurring themes in this magnificent series of novels-with a sensuous portrait of the people and places the define New Orleans, James Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin's past but to map his future . . . and our own. As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes to, he discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the shooter? Somewhere in the Crescent City--and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it--there's an answer. But to get to it, he is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid.

Finding people is what former private investigator Lew Griffin excels at. The terrible irony is that the exception is his own missing son. Dreams, memories, and reality run together to form his own darkest night. Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans--a teacher, a writer, and an ex-detective. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son--and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and toting a copy of one of Lew's novels. Learning the truth is a quest that will take Griffin into his own past as he tries to deal with the present: a search for three missing young men.

With this flashback novel to Lew Griffin's past, James Sallis takes readers to 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. A sniper has fatally shot five people. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. Though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and a bail bondsman.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in...

Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when...

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Dr. Lamar Hale, the town's all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes - his military records missing, and followed by the FBI - mysteriously reappears in...