A Sport and a Pastime

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price ( The New York Times ) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is the intensely carnal story-part shocking reality, part feverish dream -of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen-and pages that burn with a rare intensity.