Tag: novels

The year of the pig marks the centenary of J. D. Salinger.

Salinger is my favourite American writer. The Catcher In The Rye is *the* great novel about grief, and his short stories and novellas concerned with the Glass family is somehow both at once a sprawling and unassuming opus.

To mark the occasion Penguin have reissued the four Salinger books that make up his readily-available oeuvre, The Catcher In The Rye, Nine Stories (aka For Esme – With Love And Squalor), Franny And Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in handsome new editions based upon their initial iconic covers.

Salinger was famously very particular about how his work was presented, with the author eventually settling on a minimalist, text only approach to cover images. The famously reclusive author was said to be against artist impressions of his characters being submitted, instead choosing place the emphasis of creation on the combination of his words and the imagination of the reader.