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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...
The Lathe of Heaven is not a new novel, but its relevance is timeless. Published in 1971, it reflects the social upheavals of the 1960s. Ursula Le Guin’s classic is an allegory about power in the hands of people who are ill-equipped to wield it.
George Orr is a colorless, weak-willed man assigned to psychiatric treatment for using illegal drugs. He explains to Dr. William Haber that he needs the drugs to prevent him from having “effective” dreams. In one of them, a relative who’s been trying...
When considering a book purchase, I always check out Amazon’s sample pages to evaluate the writing. In this case, the phrase that hooked me was, “I stood in front of my wardrobe, which smelled like mothballs and old people.” As I continued reading, I realized I was in the presence of a great author.
Quicksilver is Emily Meyer’s debut novel. Self-published, it has only a handful of reviews, though it eclipses most of the junk posing as literature these days. Set in the mid-1980s, the story of...
Hang onto your hats, middle-schoolers! Peter Burns takes you on a swashbuckling adventure in The School for Thieves, a story that combines inspirations from Charles Dickens and Alexander Dumas.
Tom Morgan is an orphan living by his wits in a future London, where kids struggle for survival as workhouse slaves. Those clever enough to escape child snatchers work as thieves and peddlers. If that’s not enough, a deadly epidemic is on the rampage. Tom’s fortunes change when Hezekiah von Stuppe, a...
It’s hard to review a novel about child abuse objectively. Any decent person would react with horror and disgust. What makes it even harder is the detail with which the author deals with the subject.
Katerina Theodorakis, a native of New York, is married to a Greek electrician and lives in a small village on the island of Crete. Fluent in both English and Greek, she makes a happy home for herself and her daughter Aspasia while her husband is away on a long sea voyage. Katerina’s relationships...
Do you ever have such strong feelings that you’re afraid to let them out? After fifty-seven years of pent-up emotions, Artie Dam contemplates suicide. He feels too much about everything: his dead parents and sister, his son Rob, his absent friend Flossie, the kids in his history classes, and his dread of the president poised to take office in 2025.
It’s hard to reconcile Artie’s misery with the facts of his life. His marriage to Evie is solid, if imperfect. He communicates well with his...
I had to refresh my memory of Greek mythology to fully enjoy this novel. But don’t let that throw you. Authors Gary D. Schmidt and Ron Koertge wrote it for middle-schoolers who may be crossing the River Styx for the first time. You’re bound to enjoy it as much as they will.
For a kids’ book, Styx and Stones begins grimly. Simon, an ancient Athenian boy, finds himself plunged into Hades, where he spends 2,451 years feeding pomegranate seeds to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Surrounded by...
Ordinarily, I would reject a book like Glimmer. Foul language always spoils the reading experience for me, and this book has plenty of it. But the power of Sam Aleks’s narration was too strong.
Onra Kang is an arsonist, driven by a miserable childhood into a state of numbness in which her only pleasure comes from setting things on fire. She burns trash, dumpsters, junk piles, and, her favorite media, TV sets. “I can think of no greater pleasure than the finality of flame,” Onra says. But other...
If you don’t buy Whistler for any other reason, buy it for the scene in which a man and a young girl discuss books while trapped in a wrecked automobile. It’s a literary gift you will treasure.
Ann Patchett’s latest novel begins when Daphne Fuller accidentally encounters Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, after a lapse of more than 40 years. Everyone loves Eddie, but no one more than Daphne, our narrator, who recounts her mother’s unfortunate history of failed marriages. Daphne and Eddie...
This story has special significance to me. Its premise has remained in my head since I read it years ago and is a factor in my upcoming novel, Asperger.
Blood Music revolves around Vergil Ulam, a research scientist whose laboratory blunder results in an intelligent virus. Brilliant but flawed, he causes the virus to spread, resulting in consequences that are either catastrophic or benevolent, depending on your point of view.
This is more than an apocalyptic tale in which human beings try to...
The “haves” in this world tend to treat the “have-nots” as invisible. Their mute desperation makes us uncomfortable, so we look through them. Kazu Mori, the narrator of Tokyo Ueno Station, is literally invisible. He is dead, his spirit seemingly fated to linger among the homeless people who come and go through the train station and memorial park where he met his end.
Kazu recounts a life of hardship and personal tragedy. Born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, he took any sort of job he...
This week I'm taking a break from book reviews to share a delightful posting from Anne Tyler's website. Regular readers of this space know how much I love this author. Below is a link where she tells how she comes up with ideas.
Anne Tyler has written twenty-five novels. Her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. This peek into her creative process should resonate with both authors and readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Alas, Babylon appeared in 1959, when clouds of nuclear fear hovered over humanity. People built bomb shelters on their property and stocked them with water and canned food. Schools conducted duck-and-cover drills. Citizens were urged to keep their radios tuned to their CONELRAD stations. Sputnik, a primitive Russian satellite, orbited the planet, a harbinger of doom.
Pat Frank’s novel centers on the town of Fort Repose, Florida, where everybody knows everybody. The doctor makes house calls....
Autism gets a lot of news coverage these days. Woody Brown’s debut novel Upward Bound gives us a personal insight into autism and how the world appears to people like himself.
Upward Bound is a fictional daycare center for dysfunctional adults. One of them, named Walter, was able to complete high school with a lot of help from his mother. But his inability to speak prevents him from advancing further. Jorge, a giant of a man, has an inexplicable obsession with a Mr. Potato Head doll. Tom’s...
Novels about machines taking over the world are common. Glenn Dixon’s novel combines that premise with a humble little machine that wants to help humans, not dominate them.
Scout is a robotic floor vacuum that is part of a fully automated House. All household features, from the electronics to the variable wall color, are under the control of Watch, which is attached to the homeowner’s wrist. Watch is linked to the Grid, which controls everything in the world, including Scout, her kitchen...
It’s easy for adults to forget that childhood is seldom carefree. Growing up can be painful, even in the absence of a serial killer. In The List of Suspicious Things, two young friends find themselves beset by both.
Trouble has invaded the home of eleven-year-old Miv, a Yorkshire girl whose mother suffers from a mental affliction. Jean, a stern and opinionated aunt, has taken her place, holding the family together while her father works at a humble job and nips off to the neighborhood pub each...
It’s often said that America’s strength lies in its middle class: ordinary, hard-working citizens who raise families, pay taxes, and build churches. In his 1920 novel Main Street, Sinclair Lewis explores these stalwarts through the eyes of a young woman who wants more from life than mediocrity.
Carol Milford, a college graduate with lofty ambitions, marries Dr. Will Kennicott, who takes her to his home in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. There she finds her new neighbors small-minded, coarse,...