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Difficult Lives/Hitching Rides book cover

New reviews posted 15 October 2016

Signed copies (personalized on request) of the latest Sallis books are available from The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Section spéciale pour mes lecteurs français Mise à jour 28 décembre, 2014

No Exit Press: Sallis' UK publishers.

Walker Books: Sallis' primary US publishers

Host Publications: publishers of Limits of the Sensible World and Potato Tree

Lew Griffin book cover gallery (U.S. reissues)

French book cover gallery

December news: New reviews! Willnot has been reviewed by Lisa Tuttle for Ambling Along the Aquaduct, the blog for Aquaduct Press. Difficult Lives/Hitching Rides has been reviewed by Paul Burke for NB Magazine. Difficult Lives/Hitching Rides is now out from No Exit Press in the UK. Jim's latest column, for the November/December issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, is available. Also announced: Jim will be a guest at the festival Quais du polar in Lyons, France, in late March.

October news:

Jim's recent story from Analog, "New Teeth," is up, wonderfully read, on the UK blog Starship Sofa.
A much-expanded edition of Difficult Lives (backed with a collection of essays, Hitching Rides) is due shortly from No Exit Press in the UK; US publication by Syndicate Books is scheduled for spring of next year. Jim's new novel, Sarah Jane, is in production for fall 2019 publication by Soho Press in the US, No Exit in the UK. Next year will also see a fifth poetry collection, Ain't Long Fore Day, from Unsolicited Press.
Adding to the above, New Rivers Press, which so beautifully published Jim's poetry collection Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here a few years back, has accepted his latest story collection, Dayenu and Other Stories, and plans publication in 2020.
New stories from Jim are set for Asimov's ("When We Saved the World") and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ("Figs"). "When We Saved the World" begins:
I met Joe Lansdale for the first time in June, on a day buffed TV commentators were calling unseasonably warm… Joe and I'd both made tons of money writing science fiction, the way people do, and so we'd retired, but after having us around the house all day long week after week both our wives kicked us out, and we moved into the Charleton Arms.

August news: Speaking of writers who influenced him, Scottish writer Doug Johnstone recently remarked on the Royal Literary Fund site that "Sallis' novels are among the best I've ever read." Listen to the entire two-minute audio clip. Johnstone also tweeted a bit of the same.

July news: Of Jim's story "Dayenu" from the March (#37) issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, reviewer Rich Horton (in Locus, The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field) writes:

Even better is a remarkable long story by James Sallis, "Dayenu." It opens with the narrator doing an unspecified but apparently criminal job, and then fleeing the house he was squatting in, and meeting an old contact for a new identity. Seems like a crime story — and Sallis is primarily a crime novelist — but details of unfamiliarity mount, from the pervasive surveillance, to a changed geography, to the realization that the rehab stint the narrator mentioned right at the start was a rather more extensive rehab than we might have thought. Memories of wartime service are detailed, and two partners in particular — a woman named Fran or Molly, a man named Merrit Li. Page by page the story seems odder, and the destination less expected. The prose is a pleasure, too — with desolate rhythms and striking images. Quite a work, and not like anything I've recently read.

The July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is out with Jim's "Bedtime Story." New poems are upcoming in Asimov's and Ellery Queen's. Jim just delivered a new novel, Sarah Jane, to his agent. Jim's classes for August and the fall at Piper Center are full to capacity, with waiting lists for both. Students should contact the Center to be added to the waiting lists or to be notified when registration opens for the next classes.

May news: Jim will be teaching again at The Piper Center on the ASU campus, with a two-day intensive course this summer and an 8-week advanced fiction course in the fall. Registration for the first just opened; details available on their website or on Facebook. The latest installment of Jim's regular books column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, this time an essay titled "Tourists and Native Speakers" — on the gentrification of the genre — is out in the new issue. Jim's band Three-Legged Dog is playing all about Phoenix as part of its launch of their new CD, "Shiloh."

March news: Jim's "Bedtime Story" is upcoming in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His next regular books column for F&SF appears in the May/June issue; titled "Tourists and Native Speakers," it's an essay on the mainstreaming of science fiction and fantasy. A new story, "Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway," appears in the latest issue of Interzone March/April, #274), and yet another, "Freezer Burn," is upcoming in the UK in a CrimeFest 2018 anthology. Jim's novella "Dayenu" is due in the March issue (#37) of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

Click here for news prior to March 2018

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — Books — November/December 2018. James Sallis reviews fantasy and SF fiction for F&SF.


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