Non-Fiction Books

"The guitar and American music are inexorably intertwined," writes James Sallis in The Guitar Players. He notes that "American music was built on the backs of black slaves." The great classical blues period of the 1920s had rich antecedents going back further than plantation orchestras featuring fiddles and bajos. The introduction of the guitar, at first not a solo instrument, really demonstrated rhythmic ingenuity. Sallis shows how folk music and a cross-fertilization of traditions and techniques resulted in blues, ragtime, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and country-western. He writes eloquently about fourteen transitional or pivotal performers: the Mississippi Sheiks; Lonnie Johnson, the first virtuoso blues guitarist; Eddie Lang, the first great jazz guitarist; Roy Smeck, the foremost popularizer of guitar playing; Charlie Christian, the founder of modern jazz guitar; Riley Puckett, the first great country-music guitarist; T-Bone Walker, "daddy of the blues"; George Barnes; Hank Garland; Wes Montgomery, the jazz innovator; Mike Bloomfield, the heavy-rock guitarist; Ry Cooder; Ralph Towner; and Lenny Breau.

The Guitar in Jazz presents in rich, entertaining detail the history and development of the guitar as a jazz instrument. In a series of essays by some of jazz’s leading historians and critics, the volume traces the impressive evolution of jazz guitar playing, from the pioneering styles of Nick Lucas and Eddie Lang through the recent innovations of such contemporary masters as Jim Hall and Ralph Towner. Editor James Sallis has included essays that focus on individual guitarists, including Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and JoePass. Other chapters vividly describe important jazz guitar styles, such as swing guitar and fingerstyle guitar. In all, The Guitar in Jazz provides a full and captivating portrait of the guitar’s place in jazz. The book also offers insights into the larger history of jazz—its development, the social contexts in which the music came into being, and its eventual recognition as "the American classical music." The essays will appeal to guitar players and enthusiasts, and to all jazz lovers.

A critical appreciation of the acclaimed science-fiction writer and his works

Essays about the author's life in writing and music, and working as a respiratory therapist. James Sallis is the author of the widely reviewed and highly regarded Lew Griffin detective series, as well as books of jazz criticism and a new biography of Chester Himes. Gently into the Land. gives the reader an intimate view of the author's concerns-drawing meaning from tragedy, providing solace to the weak and vulnerable, gathering truth from love-and their sources. This volume will appeal to all Sallis fans.

Chester Himes's novels and memoirs represent one of the most important bodies of work by any American writer, but he is best known for The Harlem Cycle, the crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. His writing made him a major figure in Europe, but it is only recently that his talents have been acknowledged in the country that spurned him for most of his life, though his work is recognized as being on a par with that of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. In this major literary biography, acclaimed poet, critic, and novelist James Sallis explores Himes's life as no writer has attempted before. Combining the public facts with fresh interviews with the people who knew him best, including his second wife, Lesley, Sallis casts light onto the contradictions, self-interrogations, and misdirections that make Himes such an enigmatic and elusive subject. Chester Himes: A Life is a definitive study not only of the life of a major African-American man of letters, but of his writing and its relationship to the man himself, drawing a remarkable, deeply affecting portrait of a too often misunderstood and neglected writer. This is a work of high scholarship and of penetrating and passionate insight, a rare conjoining of two fine writers-and as much a work of literature as any of their novels.

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.