Three new short stories by J.D. Salinger

Willing to share the url?

A nice previous thread on Salinger's death, graced by the brilliant skdadl when she still hung out here.

Like Lennon (or, for that matter, the Goethe of Werther), Salinger deserves to be honoured in his own terms, for his own work, not for the extraliterary effects he undoubtedly had on a lot of people.Catcher in the Rye is a hard book for a lot of literary people to cope with because it is undeniably a great piece of writing, as clean and smooth as anything Hemingway ever did, and yet it connects so strangely to that adolescent phenomenon, the first discovery that adults are "phony" -- ie, hypocrites -- and the rage that many young people feel when they first perceive that about the world they're moving into as they become adults themselves.

There isn't anything in the novel that would protect from the anger/despair/whatever, and maybe there shouldn't be, It's a novel. Novelists do what they do. Salinger testified, and anyone who has ever tried to get the words right, to tell the truth instead of making things pretty, knows just how hard that is and how much Salinger accomplished. All honour to him for his writing.

That said ... I admire the book, but I turned away from it myself, even more so from his later stories. I know about depression; I fight depression myself; but I don't think I value it in the way that I feel Salinger did. His biography is problematic in other ways, if you're not judging on literary grounds alone.