Sallis, James
Entry updated 2 February 2026. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work limited his appeal in the sf world, though he received some critical acclaim for A Few Last Words (coll 1970). Though he never stopped publishing sf and fantasy in short form, he was not regarded as an active writer for some years, though this lack of notice now seems odd, given the stories assembled as Limits of the Sensible World (coll 1995 chap), Time's Hammers: The Collected Short Fiction of James Sallis (coll 2000), A City Equal to My Desire (coll 2004) and ultimately the very substantial Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction (coll 2024), which includes previously unpublished work. The best of these stories, like "Autumn Leaves" (May-June 2002 Barcelona Review; in the last two volumes listed above), are pure Horror in SF: providing apocalypse without redemption. In any case, his career took a different course at the beginning of the 1990s, and he became well-known and highly respected as a novelist of crime fiction, initially the Lew Griffin sequence beginning with The Long-Legged Fly (1992); a later tale, Drive (2005), has been filmed as Drive (2011) directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Sallis's fifteen or so novels in this broad category, none of which are fantastic, are not discussed or listed here.
His two early sf anthologies, The War Book (anth 1969) and The Shores Beneath: Novellas (anth 1971), were strongly edited. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R Delany (1996) is a study of Samuel R Delany. With Delany he also co-wrote "They Fly at Çiron" (June 1971 F&SF), an original novelette much expanded by Delany into They Fly at Çiron (fixup 1993). [JC]
James Sallis
born Helena, Arkansas: 21 December 1944
died Phoenix, Arizona: 27 January 2026
works (highly selected)
collections
- A Few Last Words (New York: Macmillan, 1970) [coll: hb/Colos]
- Limits of the Sensible World (Austin, Texas: Host Publications, 1995) [coll: chap: pb/Jakub Kalousek]
- Time's Hammers: The Collected Short Fiction of James Sallis (Birmingham, England: Crime Time Publishing, 2000) [coll: pb/]
- A City Equal to My Desire (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press/PointBlank, 2004) [coll: hb/oiva design group]
- The James Sallis Reader (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press/PointBlank, 2005) [coll: hb/photographic]
- Potato Tree (Austin, Texas: Host Publications, 2007) [coll: pb/Jakub Kalousek]
- Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction (New York: Soho Crime, 2024) [coll: hb/Dana Li]
nonfiction
- Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R Delany (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1996) [nonfiction: hb/Becket Logan]
- Difficult Lives Hitching Rides: Essays on Noir (Westminster, Maryland, 2025) [nonfiction: coll: pb/]
works as editor
- The War Book (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969) [anth: hb/]
- The Shores Beneath: Novellas (New York: Avon Books, 1971) [anth: pb/Ron Walotsky]
links
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