J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is so well known that it tends to overshadow his other works. Today I’d like to familiarize readers with his short stories. All nine of them appeared in magazines over a period of several years before being republished as a collection in 1953.

The first one, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, is perplexing. The principal character, Seymour Glass, seems to be an ordinary man until he commits a shocking act at the end. You find yourself flipping back through...

The Good German is a murder mystery that imagines life in Berlin at the end of World War II. Through the eyes of an American newsman, we get a bitter taste of how grim those days must have been.

Jake Geismar's visit to the city has two purposes: to cover the Potsdam conference for Collier’s magazine, and to search for his former mistress, Lena Brandt, wife of a German scientist. A third mission develops when the body of an American army officer, his pockets bulging with money, washes up on a...

Today’s book market is so glutted with self-published novels that readers often find it hard to separate the good from the mediocre and the terrible. Sunil Bhatia’s The Weeper belongs to the good category.

Reminiscent of the Book of Job, the novel concerns Gabriel Crossman, a father who has lost everything in a home invasion. With his wife and daughters dead and his house burned to the ground, he holes up in a cheap motel, nursing guilt and rage, until a stranger who seems to know all about...