A remarkable diversity of style and content is to be found in James Sallis’s story collection What You Were Fighting For. The American author is best known as the writer of the novel Drive, adapted into the successful Ryan Gosling-starring movie of the same name.
But Sallis is a veteran of multiple genres, from crime to science fiction, poetry to criticism, with dozens of books in his backlist. He is also viewed by authors as a master of understated prose, a writer who cuts straight to the heart of his characters and their actions with a minimum of fuss and a simple profundity.
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Reading What You Were Fighting For, you get the impression that short stories are Sallis’s first love, and this scintillating collection is profound one moment, hilarious the next, and all points in between. Plaintive and contemplative stories that sit adjacent to the crime genre are plentiful, most notably a beautiful and moving title story which obliquely features a cameo by the anti-hero of Drive.
Elsewhere, there is comedic meta-fiction in the shape of ‘As Yet Untitled’ and ‘Billy Delivers Next 12 Novels’ as well as sly forays into speculative and dystopian fiction.
The stories have a thread of self-deprecation running through them, an awareness of the frailty of the human condition that Sallis evokes better than almost anyone. Whether they’re lowbrow or highbrow, grittily real or wonderfully surreal, these stories have vulnerable characters at their core, people struggling to make sense of the world – just like in real life. A heartwarming, uplifting read from start to finish.
What You Were Fighting For by James Sallis is out now (No Exit Press, £9.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
