Extraordinary . . . at once tender, exultant, unabashedly sexual, sensual, and profoundly sad. Light Years is a masterpiece.
Elizabeth Benedict, Philadelphia Inquirer
Remarkable. . . . Salter celebrates the silver-and-golden bitterness of life. Light Years . . . becomes an unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time.
James Wolcott, Esquire
[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic.
Bloomsbury Review
An absolutely beautiful, monstrous, important book.
Joy Williams
Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring.
Lauren Groff
For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years . As a writer, I am shamelessly in its debt.
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Paris Review
"Light Years, for its relative compactness, is, like all great works of fiction, no easy novel to sum up, so nuanced is its view of human beings, so rich and varied its fictive effects, so large its intention."
Richard Ford, from his Introduction
Every time I read [James Salter's] work I feel a kindred spirit there and am convinced all over again that the way we write a sentence can be everything: exploration, devotion, celebration.
George Saunders, The Southampton Review