“The best novel I’ve read in years. All That Is will be treasured by its readers.”
Tim O’Brien

Chairperson: Stephen Matterson

With the deaths of Norman Mailer, John Updike and JD Salinger, and Philip Roth announcing his retirement, the golden generation of post-war American novelists has all but disappeared. Only James Salter remains. Salter’s name may be less familiar than the others, but since his first novel, The Hunters in 1957, he has been feted for his virtuoso sentences and the inimitable cadence of his prose. A Sport and a Pastime, his 1967 novel about the erotic relationship between an American student and a French girl, is an established classic, and he has long been regarded as “a master of the great American short story” (The London Times).

His last novel was published in 1979, and though Salter has continued to publish acclaimed short stories and a memoir, Burning the Days, it’s only now, at the age of 87, that he has returned to the novel with All That Is, a sweeping, seductive love story set in post-war America that draws together all the themes of his life’s work: war, love, sex, marriage and what it means to write. His appearance in Ireland at Dublin Writers Festival is a unique event, and an unmissable opportunity to hear one of the voices of a generation.