The Catcher in the Rye is J . D. Salinger's world-famous novel of disaffected youth. Holden Caulfield is a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way through the challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.Written with the clarity of a boy leaving childhood behind, The Catcher in the Rye explores the world with disarming frankness and a warm, affecting charisma which has made this novel a universally loved classic of twentieth-century literature.J. D. Salinger was born in 1919 and died in January 2010. He grew up in New York City, and wrote short stories from an early age, but his breakthrough came in 1948 with the publication in The New Yorker of 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'. The Catcher in the Rye was his first and only novel, published in 1951. It remains one of the most translated, taught and reprinted texts, and has sold some 65 million copies. His other works include the novellas Franny and Zooey, For Esme with Love and Squalor, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, published with Seymour - An Introduction.
Рита Райт-Ковалева Book order (chronological)
Rita Wright-Kovalyova was a distinguished Russian writer and translator whose work significantly enriched Russian literature through her translations of seminal works by global authors. Her meticulous and sensitive approach brought pieces by Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.D. Salinger to Russian readers for the first time. Beyond her extensive translation efforts, Wright-Kovalyova also authored original works, including biographical portraits and memoirs, shedding light on the lives and contributions of notable figures in Russian literature and culture. Her literary output demonstrates a profound grasp of narrative form and a remarkable ability to convey the essence of original texts into new linguistic settings, earning her acclaim from both critics and the reading public.
Franny and Zooey
- 202 pages
- 8 hours of reading
The short story, Franny , takes place in an unnamed college town and tells the tale of an undergraduate who is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her. The novella, Zooey , is named for Zooey Glass, the second-youngest member of the Glass family. As his younger sister, Franny, suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in her parents' Manhattan living room -- leaving Bessie, her mother, deeply concerned -- Zooey comes to her aid, offering what he thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and words of sage advice. Salinger writes of these works: "FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my 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."