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Slightly surrealistic, meditative, elegiac, this collection of poetry from author James Sallis is concerned with aging, relationships, loss, and love. It is poetry written and read late at night and in the early morning hours, when, sleepless, we think about life and what went wrong. Sallis is a noir genre mystery writer and the feeling of that genre is evident here-despair that is occasionally surprised by joy. For these poems are not dark and depressing, despite the subject matter; they are suffused with happiness, with the celebration of everyday events. They are the reflections of an author in full command of the language, who fully recognizes life's triumphs as well as life's losses.
This book is a collection of the short fiction of James Sallis, best known for his crime novels set in New Orleans.
From crimes of heart and crimes of violence, A CITY EQUAL TO MY DESIRE effortlessly guides you through the narrows of human existence in all its forms. In this selection of new stories, James Sallis, author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of detective novels, both entertains and engages the mind with stories that will linger in memory long after they've been experienced. "Sallis wants to take your experience of the world, mutate it to the edge of recognition, and then deliver it back before your eyes like a coin pulled from behind your earlobe. And in this way, he makes you see and feel, all over again, the meaning, the beauty-and, pointedly sometimes, the horror-of being human." Jack O'Connell from his introduction
Fiction. Short Stores. POTATO TREES's 41 stories, with their vivid imagery, poetic language and heart-wrenching emotions, are Sallis at his edgiest, most indefinable best. James Sallis is best-known for his six-volume Lew Griffin cycle, his authoritative biography of Chester Himes, the novel DRIVE which the New York Times called "a perfect noir novel", and for his criticism of literary, foreign-language and genre writing.
Jim Sallis has published fourteen novels including the Lew Griffin cycle and Drive, the standard biography of Chester Himes, a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin, and multiple collections of essays, stories and poems.
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "The world has long been full of praise for Jim Sallis's crime novels' poetic prose and richly-described landscapes. It is time that we simply call Sallis a poet, one who depicts and reveals our inner landscape. These poems [in BLACK NIGHT'S GONNA CATCH ME HERE] are both musical and plainspoken; they do not employ 'exalted speech' (as he says, 'we fought it. Took barrooms / home to bed, the American idiom, real warts / on imaginary frogs') but instead use language for the best reasons, to 'find beauty, try to understand, survive.'"—Katrina Vandenberg
James Sallis’ latest poetry collection is a study in gothic noir where post-war trauma surfaces in a speaker’s haunted relationship with time and space, where the familiar is strange, and the strange is familiar.In Night’s Pardons , Sallis writes of the “terror of the ordinary,” the things that keep us up at night, that populate the darkness waiting for an absolution we cannot muster, from which we can find no peace except in the language of poetry itself.
Reflecting as always his deep respect for classic science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, DAYENU AND OTHER STORIES collects 22 of Jim's new tales. Bluesmen whose thoughts become real, chatty philosophic spiders, revenant cars, thawed-out hitmen, TVs reporting people to police, a character condemned to life as a sidekick in hack novels--all from the mind that spawned the Lew Griffin novels, Willnot , Sarah Jane , and Drive . Fiction.
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 Littérature Policière. 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.