No Exit Press - James Sallis

Biography

A novelist, prolific short story writer, poet, editor, reviewer, teacher, essayist, translator and musicologist, James Sallis is also a trained musician, playing the french horn, violin, guitar, mandolin and dobro.

He has been described as 'a mind and talent of uncommon dimensions' (Harlan Ellison); the Los Angeles Times called his work 'poetic, complex and multidimensional', and Lawrence Block said: 'James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir'. Clearly he is not an average crime writer and the ongoing series of books featuring Lew Griffin is not a routine collection of novels.

James Sallis was born in 1944 and grew up in Helena, Arkansas, but has subsequently lived in a wide variety of places, including New Orleans, London, New York City, Boston, and Paris. He attended, then dropped out of Tulane University in New Orleans, when he began to sell his short stories (although there has clearly been some peacemaking as he has recently donated his personal papers to the New Orleans University's special collections), and subsequently trained as a respiratory therapist which he discovered he could do 'fairly well', giving him the mobility of a qualification that he could use where-ever he went.

His literary career is remarkably wide ranging, including many short stories, essays and poems. (See below for a selected bibliography). For a time Sallis was associated with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine, acting as editor for a period, and he has maintained his interest in alternative futures, currently contributing a regular review column to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is perhaps an indication of the oblique angle that Sallis approaches the crime fiction genre. In a review for the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair wrote: 'Now the only way for the veterans of that generation [writers of the Sixties associated with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds] to work is to smuggle their subversive poetic into what Sallis calls 'the Halloween bag' of genre fiction - but without feeling bound by any of the conventions of that market'.

He has also published collections of poetry and translated many European writers, including Raymond Queneau, Blaise Cendrars, Yves Bonnefoy, Andrei Voznesensky, Marcelin Pleynet, Mikhail Lermontov, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Polish writer Marek Hlasko. His poetry collection Sorrow's Kitchen is due for publication in America this autumn.

Current Affairs

Following the conclusion of the Lew Griffin sequence with The Ghost Of A Flea, there is a new novel in the pipeline, Cypress Grove, due in the UK from No Exit Press in July 2003.

His collected short fiction Time's Hammers was recently published by Toxic Press, containing a short story, Blue Devils, which was shortlisted for a CWA Award. You can read it in full here.

Another short story by James Sallis, Shutting Darkness Down, can be found online at the Richmond Review, and a third, Hazards of Autobiography is available from the Mississippi Review.

Canongate's imprint, the Payback Press, have published his definitive biography of Chester Himes. Ian Rankin describes the work as 'no mere history of a personality... Sallis brings exceptional depth and empathy to his portrait of Himes'. Canongate have also posted an exclusive short story and it seems that Sallis' extraordinary ability may be coming to the attention of a whole new generation of readers.

James Sallis has his own website at jamessallis.com with a remarkable collection of information about him, his work and his current activities, regularly featuring new writings and works in progress.

James Sallis published by No Exit Press

Long-legged Fly/Moth An Ace Double - Two Novels In One

Death Will Have Your Eyes

Ghost Of A Flea (h/b)
Limited Edition

Ghost Of A Flea (p/b)

Cypress Grove [due July 2003]

Bibliography

The Lew Griffin Novels