Salter’s collection Last Night: Stories was well-received by reviewers and served to reinforce his already-impressive reputation as a writer’s writer with an uncanny eye for the undertones and subtleties of the world of manners and cultured people. Dinitia Smith writes of Salter’s fiction generally in the New York Times (1997):

In the universe of James Salter’s novels, men are men and women don’t have jobs. The characters drink Chateau Margaux and Kirs and Calvados. The women give the men long, narrow looks and say wry things, and when they make love, the earth does not just move. It quakes.

Such observations apply well to the stories collected in Last Night: Stories, as does the assessment of another New York Times writer, Adam Begley, who describes Salter’s fictions as “a dazzling display of polished surfaces...