The octogenarian American writer James Salter is being fêted this month as an overlooked fiction giant. Two publishers have joined forces to advance his claims to admission to the literary pantheon, with four reissues accompanying the paperback appearance of Last Night (Picador 132pp £7.99), a new collection of short stories. 

Looking at the testimonials on the jackets – from the New Yorker and the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani and Susan Sontag – a captious person might wonder if these East Coast intellectuals respond with such rapture to his work because it’s about figures just like them: the 1975 novel