John Salter
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There Will Never Be Another Night Like This
Slant Books
John Salter’s stories are of people quietly in trouble. Here are lives come to crossroads or parked at waysides; lives in need of a U-turn or a decision to drive straight on till daylight, though daylight in this lonely Upper Midwest is a long way off. These are ruminative tales of people on the brink of something they can’t yet name, and Salter’s beautiful language and willingness to let his characters careen make this a deeply moving and memorable collection.
Bret Lott, author of Jewel and The Hunt Club
This is a collection to savor, full to the brim with rich, generous stories that offer startling surprises of both the physical and the metaphysical variety. John Salter goes deep with his graceful prose and his complicated characters; you couldn’t ask for a better guide to the pressure, challenges, and myths that surround the American male experience.
Valerie Sayers, author of The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories
Salter’s characters, like Cheever’s and Updike’s, have a deep capacity for poetic self-reflection that is intensely satisfying. Fully entangled in social and family relationships, the characters in There Will Never Be Another Night Like This often seem to long for a simpler, more primal, existence. Salter renders the million small gestures and cues his characters must study to try to stay intact and maybe even get what they want in this minefield of a world.
Cheri Johnson, author of Annika Rose
John Salter’s new stories take us to familiar places. They make us smile to ourselves before the weight of the plot hits us like a hungry middleweight. By the end of each of these stories, I’m looking out the window, thinking big and small thoughts that could tilt a moral compass, or at least drench it in Beefeater’s gin and Johnny Walker Red. Salter is a writer’s writer but, like McGuane and Harrison, he’s accessible to all readers.
Scott Winter, Bethel University
Alberta Clipper
Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama
I found these stories so completely absorbing and compelling that not once did I catch myself putting on my literary bifocals to study the manner in which they were written. It’s John Salter’s great accomplishment that he is able to convert somebody who thinks he is quite a literary authority into a plain old delighted reader.
Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate, author of Weather Central and Winter Morning Walks
In John Salter’s quirky, off-beat stories, things are not quite right. People go off the deep end before they realize they’re on the high dive. Drums beat mysteriously in the night, blizzards obscure thinking as well as sight, fantasy clouds reality. These stories…knock you off balance, like an Alberta Clipper, one of those snowstorms that sweep across the northern plains and make you realize that life is more uncertain, more precarious, more unpredictable than you had thought.
William Borden, author of Superstoe and Dancing with Bears
A Trout in the Sea of Cortez
Counterpoint Books
John Salter gives us a compelling portrait of everything that is right and wrong with being a married man in the middle of contemporary America. He speaks with a fierce honesty, tempered with appealing images and insights that make us both laugh and cry…Salter is a fine writer with the muscular grace of a wind-swept prairie.
Jonis Agee, author of Strange Angels and Bend this Heart
A Trout in the Sea of Cortez is an excellent novel that criss-crosses genres with daring abandon. The perennial theme of male collapse is very fresh, as is the absolutely fresh setting of North Dakota. I like this book very much.
Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Dalva
Currently out of print, but widely available used
Watch/Listen to Book Launch Event for There Will Never Be Another Night Like This
Good Dog Calliope is fascinated by John’s Book Launch! Or is she waiting for that makeshift iPad studio to collapse? Check it out on YouTube or Spotify! CLICK to get it now.
Read an interview with John on the publication of There Will Never Be Another Night Like This. CLICK to read
Read some flash fiction!
Fifty-Fifty
A reluctant hangman contemplates life and death in the Old West. In Brilliant Flash Fiction. Read HERE
Belladonna
A transfer student causes chaos in a seventh-grade classroom. In Citron Review. Read HERE
In Vitro Veritas
A first kiss and a shocking act of contraceptive sabotage. In Vestal Review. Read HERE
SALTER fiction 