SOURCE: Wild, Peter. Review of Dusk and Other Stories, by James Salter. Western American Literature 23, no. 4 (winter 1989): 375.

In the following review, Wild offers a mixed assessment of Dusk and Other Stories.

Thrown from her horse and badly crushed, a lone rider remembers her past lovers. Bored by success, two American lawyers try to expunge their world-weariness on their tour of Italy by picking up a schoolgirl. A well-off divorcée learns to her sadness that a lover has betrayed her. Such are the pangs in James Salter's first collection of short stories [Dusk]. People fixate on love as life's antidote, only to end up rejected or victorious in the wrong bed.

It's not only that the characters keep “looking for love in all the wrong places.” What troubles here is the steady diet of self-absorption. One feels a bit awkward trying to believe that a lady just crushed...