A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel by James Salter

Now reissued with a new introduction, a modern classic—a bitter love story set in the French countryside—by a writer who helped define American prose style for a generation of writers and readers

"A feast of love is beginning. Everything that has gone before is only a sort of introduction. Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have found their domain . . . "

A Sport and a Pastime is the story of a love affair—between Dean, a disaffected young American, eking out an expatriate's rootless existence in France, and Anne-Marie, an even younger working-class Frenchwoman, who longs for a conventional connection but nonetheless is a willing partner in the erotic dance that overtakes and then removes them both—however temporarily—from the rest of the world. It is a story marked by intense feeling and by diamond-hard observations—some real, some imagined—from the narrator, a somewhat older friend of Dean's who foresees the path the affair must follow but still is obsessed, even jealous, of the power that lust at its most deeply felt can generate. It is indeed "a tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliff-hanger, [and] an opaline vision of Americans in France" (The New York Times Book Review).