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This page lists novels, short story collections, poetry, translations and non-fiction by James Sallis.

Written by James Sallis:
- novels, story collections
- non-fiction
- poetry collections

Translated by James Sallis:
- translations

Edited by James Sallis:
- fiction/non-fiction collections

A Few Last Words: A Parable and a Prophecy

James Sallis

1970

A collection of short fiction pieces. The contents are:

• Jim & Mary G
• Letter To A Young Poet
• Faces, Hands
• Kettle Of Stars
• The Floors Of His Heart
• The Opening Of The Terran Ballet
• The History Makers
• And Then The Dark
• Front & Centaur
• Enclave
• Slice Of Universe
• The Anxiety In The Eyes Of The Cricket
• Jeremiad
• Occasions
• Kazoo
• The Creation Of Bennie Good
• Jane Crying
• Bubbles
• A Few Last Words

The Long-Legged Fly

James Sallis

1992

A Lew Griffin novel.

"There are those who vanish into the steaming New Orleans night - and it is part time Private Investigator and blues aficionado Lew Griffin's job to find them. A prisoner of the bottle, his past and his skin, Griffin knows every hidden corner of Hell. But the disappearance of a militant woman activist is about to carry the brilliant, tormented P.I. ever closer to a nightmare that threatens to hit him where he lives...and more brutally than he ever imagined possible."

Moth

James Sallis

1993

A Lew Griffin novel.

"One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin's dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, LaVerne Adams, is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers... leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery. Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented ex-PI to danger like a moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again."

Black Hornet

James Sallis

1994

A Lew Griffin novel.

"In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer - by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter's sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin's side. the victim was white. Griffin is black - a reluctant young PI whose poet's heart has already been hardened by amoral injustice and heavy drink. And though he had only just met his unfortunate companion, Griffin knows it's up to him to find her killer - before a madman puts the final match to a volatile urban tinderbox."

Limits of the Sensible World

James Sallis

1994

A collection of short stories. The contents are:

• The Creation of Bennie Good
• I Saw Robert Johnson
• Others
• Only the Words Are Different
• My Friend Zarathustra
• Kazoo
• Bubbles
• Intimations
• Need
• Doucement, S'il Vous Plaît
• Insect Men of Boston
• The First Few Kinds of Truth
• Delta Flight 281
• Potato Tree
• 53rd American Dream
• Wolf
• The Good in Men
• Moments of Personal Adventure

Renderings

James Sallis

1995

"A man travels alone to an island. There he reflects on his life as an artist–a writer–and the women he has loved. The reader realizes that this man is on the edge of sanity, and his review of his life is his attempt to retain what he can of sanity and meaning. Renderings is a novel written so tightly that no air escapes and no impurity seeps in."

Eye of the Cricket

James Sallis

1997

A Lew Griffin novel.

"A derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City, there are answers and more questions; there are threats and the promise of salvation; and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffin's younger days as well as the possibility of rising from it, redeemed."

Death Will Have Your Eyes

James Sallis

1997

"David (as he's currently known) was one of an elite corps of spies trained during the chilliest days of the Cold War. But those days are long gone and for nine years he has been an ordinary, upstanding citizen....Until, that is, a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him. The only other known survivor of that elite corps has gone rogue. They need David to stop him. What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the board that is the American landscape. Haunting, visceral, and utterly magnificent, Death Will Have Your Eyes is a novel about spying in the way that All the King's Men is a novel about politics - ultimately, its agents spy into that oddity known as the human condition."

Bluebottle

James Sallis

1999

A Lew Griffin novel.

"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, Griffin 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 sniper? Somewhere in the Crescent City - and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it - there's an answer to the questions left by that shot that echoed through the night. But to get to it, Griffin is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid."

Ghost of a Flea

James Sallis

2000

A Lew Griffin novel.

"In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone again - or almost. He and Deborah are drifting apart. His son David has disappeared again, leaving behind a note that sounds final. Heading homeward from his retirement party, his friend, Don Walsh has been shot while interrupting a robbery. Worst of all, Lew himself is directionless, no longer teaching, with little to fill his days. He hasn't written anything in years. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters sent to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be alright again. He thinks about his own life, about the other's, about how the two of them came to be here."

Time's Hammers: The Collected Short Fiction Of

James Sallis

2000

Collected short fiction written between 1968 and 1999. The contents are:

• It’s Three O’Clock: Do You Know Where Your Monsters Are?
• Attitude of the Earth Toward Other Bodies
• Kaz
• Bubbles
• The Anxiety in the Eyes of the Cricket
• Breakfast with Ralph
• Intimations
• Letter to a Young Poet
• Faces, Hands
• The History Makers
• Impossible Things Before Breakfast
• Echo
• Doucement, S’il Vous Plaît
• Front & Centaur
• Changes
• At the Fitting Shop
• Walls of Affection
• The Invasion of Dallas
• Driving
• A Few Last Words
• Powers of Flight
• Finger and Flame
• Potato Tree
• Need
• Old Times
• Becoming
• Dawn Over Doldrums
• Ansley’s Demons
• Forward, Bravely
• Jim and Mary G
• I Saw Robert Johnson
• Vocalities
• Others
• Pure Reason
• Wolf
• Dogs in the Nighttime
• Memory
• The Leveller
• Joyride
• Delta Flight 281
• More Light
• And then the dark
• D.C. al FINE
• Blue Lab
• Blue Devils
• Oblations
• Winner
• Shutting Darkness Down
• Dear Floods of Her Hair
• Moments of Personal Adventure
• Good Men

Cypress Grove

James Sallis

2003

A Turner novel.

"The small town where Turner has moved is the perfect hide-away for him to forget he was a cop, a psychotherapist but always an ex-con - until a body is found and Turner is thrust into the investigation and everything he thought he had left behind.Turner slowly becomes reacquainted not only with the darkness he had fled, but with the unsuspected kindness of others. Brilliantly balancing Turner's past and present lives, Cypress Grove is lyrical, moving and filled with the sense of place and character that only our finest writers can achieve."

A City Equal to My Desire

James Sallis

2004

A collection of new short stories.

" 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."

• Introduction (Jack O'Connell)
• Ukulele And The World’s Pain
• Drive
• When Fire Knew My Name
• Get Along Home
• Blue Yonders
• Stepping Away From The Stone
• Second Thoughts
• Christian
• Concerto For Violence And Orchestra
• New Life
• Roofs And Forgiveness In The Early Dawn
• Under Construction
• Venice Is Sinking Into The Sea
• Pitt's World
• Flesh Of Stone And Steel
• Up
• Day’s Heat
• Autumn Leaves
• The Monster In Mid-Life
• The Museum Of Last Week
• The Genre Kid
• Telling Lives
• Your New Career

Drive

James Sallis

2005

"Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., Drive is about a man who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night. Sallis combines murder, treachery and payback in a sinister plot with resonances of 1940s pulp fiction and film noir. Told through a cinematic narrative that weaves back and forth through time and place, the story explores Driver's near-existential moral foundations, intercut with moments of bloody violence."

The James Sallis Reader

James Sallis

2005

"The POINT BLANK READER series is dedicated to introducing you to the finest novelists in the mystery and crime fiction genres in carefully selected volumes that each include a full length novel, selected shorter fiction and other writings by the author. JAMES SALLIS is the author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of detective novels, multiple collections of short fiction, essays, poems, musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and several other books. This volume includes his novels DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES and RENDERINGS, numerous short stories, poems, personal essays and articles on crime writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Gerald Kersh and others."

Cripple Creek

James Sallis

2006

A Turner novel.

"A year or so has passed since the events of Cypress Grove. Ex-policeman, ex-con, former therapist, Turner has become Deputy Sheriff in the small town within driving distance of Memphis, Tennessee, to which he had migrated in hopes of escaping his past. His life is mending as he and Val Bjorn grow closer. And then a young man, arrested on a routine traffic stop with more than $200,000 in his trunk, is forcibly sprung from jail after Sheriff Don Lee is brutally assaulted. Throwing caution aside, Turner goes in pursuit to Memphis, unleashing ghosts he thought he had left behind, and endangering all that matters to him now."

Salt River

James Sallis

2007

A Turner novel.

"As Salt River begins, two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for picking up the pieces around her death, not sure how much he or the town has left. Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes ploughing down Main Street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car. And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle so that it looks as though he has two heads. 'They think I killed someone,' he says. Turner asks: 'Did you?' And Eldon responds: 'I don't know.' Haunted by his own ghosts, Turner nonetheless goes in search of a truth he's not sure he can live with."

Potato Tree

James Sallis

2007

A collection of 41 short stories.

"Potato Tree is a series of dramatic and surrealistic short stories. Vivid imagery and heart wrenching emotions seep into Sallis' complex characters throughout the 41 stories in this unique and vibrant collection."

• The creation of Bennie Good
• How's death?
• An ascent of the moon
• I saw Robert Johnson
• Men's club
• Others
• Jane crying
• Allowing the lion
• Only the words are different
• Syphilis : a synopsis
• Recits
• My friend Zarathustra
• Free time
• Bleak bay
• Alaska
• Kazoo
• Bubbles
• Saguaro arms
• Three stories
• Intimations
• Need
• Wolf
• 53rd American dream
• The Western campaign
• Career moves
• Notes
• Octobers
• Enclave
• Insect men of Boston
• Doucement, S'il Vous Plait
• The first few kinds of truth
• Delta flight 281
• Potato tree
• Among the ruins of poetry
• The very last days of Boston
• Hope : an outline
• Hazards of autobiography
• European experience
• The good in men
• Moments of personal adventure
• Marrow

The Killer is Dying

James Sallis

2011

"A hired killer on his final job, a burned out detective whose wife is dying slowly, a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society. The detective is looking for the killer, Christian, though he doesn't know that. Christian is trying to find the man who stepped in and took down his target. And the boy, Jimmie, is having the killer's dreams. While they never meet, they are inextricably linked - and as their stories unfold, all find the solace of community."

Driven

James Sallis

2012

"Seven years have passed since Driver ended his campaign against those who double-crossed him. He has left the old life, become Paul West and founded a successful business back in Phoenix. But walking down the street one day, he and his fiancée are attacked by two men and, while Driver dispatches both, his fiancée is killed. Sinking back into anonymity, aided by his friend Felix, an ex-gangbanger and Desert Storm vet, Driver realises that his past stalks him - and will not stop. He has to turn and face it."

Others of My Kind

James Sallis

2013

"At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world's good people. One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatised. Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected chain of events. As brilliantly spare and compact as all of James Sallis's novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down."

Willnot

James Sallis

2016

"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 his hometown, at Hale's door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the inexplicable vagaries of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale's world is truly upended. In his inimitable spare style, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes that resonate long after they appear. You live with someone year after year, you think you've heard all the stories… but you never have."

The Guitar Players: One Instrument and Its Masters in American Music

James Sallis

1982

"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."

Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson – David Goodis – Chester Himes

James Sallis

1993

Gently into the Land of the Meateaters

James Sallis

2000

"This book includes essays about the author's life in writing and music, and working as a respiratory therapist."

Chester Himes: A Life

James Sallis

2000

"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 Gravedigger 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."

Sorrow's Kitchen

James Sallis

2000

"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."

Rain's Eagerness

James Sallis

2013

Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: New & Selected Poems

James Sallis

2015

"These poems in Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here are both musical and plainspoken; they do not employ 'exalted speech' but instead use language for the best reasons, to 'find beauty, try to understand, survive'."

Night's Pardons

James Sallis

2016

"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."

Saint Glinglin

Raymond Queneau

Translation and introduction: James Sallis

Dalkey Archive Press

1993

"Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said 'can be mentioned without incongruity in the company” of Mann’s Magic Mountain and Joyce’s Ulysses.' …. In this strange tale of a land where it never rains, where a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin’s Day, Queneau deploys fractured syntax, hidden structures, self-imposed constraints, playful allusions, and puns and neologisms to explore the most basic concepts of culture. In the process, Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology, all the while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale."

My Tongue in Other Cheeks: A Selection Of Translations By

James Sallis

2003

Translations of poems by French, Spanish and Russian poets.

The War Book

Editor: James Sallis

1969

Thirteen short science fiction stories on the theme of war. Edited and with an introduction by James Sallis.

The Shores Beneath

Editor: James Sallis

1971

An anthology comprising four science fiction novellas. The contents are:

• Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (Samuel R. Delany)
• The Graveyard Heart (Roger Zelazny)
• Masterson and the Clerks (John T. Sladek)
• The Asian Shore (Thomas M. Disch)

Jazz Guitars: An Anthology

Editor: James Sallis

1984

An anthology of articles about jazz guitarists and their music.

" Although the guitar has played a sizeable role in jazz since at least the early 1920s--when Eddie Lang added his six-string expertise to recordings by the Mound City Blue Blowers--there have been surprisingly few books on the subject. James Sallis's fine anthology covers all the bases, from early pioneers like Lang and Charlie Christian to latter-day virtuosi like Jim Hall and Bill Frisell. Hardly a single significant player is overlooked. In addition, there's an attractive variety to the essays themselves, which include both close-focus examinations of particular performances such as Django Reinhardt's "You Rascal You," and wide-angle historical pieces such as Leonard Feather's introductory ramble."

The Guitar in Jazz

Editor: James Sallis

1996

"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 Joe Pass. 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."

Ash of Stars: On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany

Editor: James Sallis

1996

A collection of articles on the writings of Samuel R. Delany. The contents are:

• Introduction (James Sallis)
• The Languages of Science Fiction: Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (Carl Malmgren) To See What Condition Our Condition Is In: Trial by Language in Stars in
• My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (Mary Kay Bray)
• Debased and Lascivious: Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (by Russell Blackford)
• The Politics of Desire in Delany’s Triton and Tides of Lust (Robert Elliot Fox)
• On Dhalgren (Jean Mark Gawron)
• This You-Shaped Hole of Insight and Fire: Meditations on Delany’s Dhalgren (Robert Elliot Fox)
• Necessary Constraints: Samuel R. Delany on Science Fiction (David N. Samuelson)
• Nevèrÿon Deconstructed : Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon and the Modular Calculus (Kathleen L. Spencer)
• Delany's Dirt (Ray Davis)
• Subverted Equations: G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form and Samuel R.
• Delany’s Analytics of Attention (Ken James)
• Selected Bibliography