'If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'

The first of J. D. Salinger's four books to be published, The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most widely read and beloved of all contemporary American novels.

'The handbook of the adolescent heart' The New Yorker

'Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.'

First published in the New Yorker as two sequential stories, 'Franny' and 'Zooey' offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family.

'Salinger's masterpiece' Guardian

'This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.'

This collection of nine stories includes the first appearance of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family, introducing Seymour Glass in the unforgettable 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'.

'The most perfectly balanced collection of stories I know' Ann Patchett

The Catcher in the Rye SparkNotes Literature Guide by J.D. Salinger
Making the reading experience fun!
 
When a paper is due, and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis; explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols; a review quiz; and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.
 
Includes:

• An A+ Essay—an actual literary essay written about the Spark-ed book—to show students how a paper should be written.
• 16 pages devoted to writing a literary essay including: a glossary of literary terms
• Step-by-step tutoring on how to write a literary essay
• A feature on how not to plagiarize

Three formative short stories by one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century.

A cocktail party conversation is most revealing in what is left unsaid. Tensions between a brother and sister escalate to violent threats. A soldier heading off to war is torn between duty to his country and to his family.

These stories, first published in magazines in the 1940s and long out of print, showcase the formidable talent that would blossom in The Catcher in the Rye.

The first book by J. D. Salinger to be published in fifty years, Three Early Stories is a crucial addition to the shelves of Salinger fans and newcomers to his work alike.

Jerome David Salinger published just one novel and three short story collections in his lifetime, but is regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century. His books - The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - were published between 1951 and 1963, and Salinger lived most of his later life out of the public eye. J. D. Salinger died in 2010.

'He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet...'

These two novellas, set seventeen years apart, are both concerned with Seymour Glass - the eldest son of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family - as recalled by his closest brother, Buddy.

'The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully-realized families in all fiction' The New York Times