Shelf Awareness
James Salter, "a writer who contemplated love, mortality and the lives of men of action in his novels and short stories and who built a quiet reputation as an extraordinary prose stylist," died Friday, the Washington Post reported, adding that he "was perhaps best known for a slim 1967 novel, A Sport and a Pastime." He was 90.
Noting that he "wrote slowly, exactingly and, by almost every critics estimation, beautifully," the New York Times said that Michael Dirda once observed "he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence."For the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote: "The news, in its way unexpected, felt like one of those breath-stealing turns out of Light Years, his masterpiece, or All That Is, his final work. Both novels span decades, depicting fairly ordinary lives studded with such swipes of fate. Salter, though admired principally as a sculptor of sentences, may have been close to peerless (Alice Munro comes to mind, too) in his talent, and taste, for expressing the mercilessness of times passing."
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Belinda Hollyer, a children's book author who also worked extensively in publishing, has died, the Guardian reported. She was 70. Hollyer moved from her native New Zealand to London in the 1970s and began her career working for the Macdonald Group. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she held two senior management jobs--as managing director of Random House Children's Books and then as head of Philips Media's London office. In 2002, Hollyer's first novel for children, A Long Walk to Lavender Street, was published and several more followed, including River Song, "her most popular book"; along with poetry collections and history books for kids, the Guardian wrote.
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