Рита Райт-Ковалева Books

J.D. Salinger, author of the classic Catcher in the Rye (1951), wrote the stories Franny and Zooey for publication in the New Yorker magazine in 1955 and 1957 respectively. Both stories were part of a series centred around a family of settlers in New York, the Glasses, particularly the children of Les and Bessie Glass, a Jewish-Irish theatrical act. All are brilliant former radio actors. Their eldest child, Seymour, a genius, commits suicide in his thirties. The repercussions to the family of this act provide the unifying theme to the stories. In Franny and Zooey the youngest member of the family, Franny, has a religious and nervous breakdown. She attempts to ward off the meaninglessness of college life by the obsessive repetition of a Jesus prayer. Her brother Zachary (Zooey) rests at nothing in his attempts to restore her sanity. J.D. Salinger wrote the Glass stories, 'It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in ly own methods, locutions and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful.I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.'

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind. J.D. Salinger's (1919–2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.