Salinger in the mood for stories. Always. ( )

Hmm. Not quite as good as I remembered. But I still really like "The Laughing Man" and "Just Before the War with the Eskimos". ( )

Loved it of course! ( )

A young woman discusses her husband’s strange behavior on the phone with her mother while the husband is out exhibiting, well, strange behavior. Two college roommates get together in an affluent Connecticut suburb to drink and compare disillusionments in their lives. A teenage girl visits the home of a schoolmate to collect on a debt and winds up having an awkward conversation with her friend’s brother. A man reminisces about a time in his youth when he was part of organized activity group led by a memorable storyteller. A young mother seems in over her head dealing with her precocious, but disturbed, son. A man recalls an impactful encounter with a young girl he met years before while waiting to be deployed in the war. A man calls his business partner worrying about his missing wife not realizing the partner knows exactly where she is. A man remembers a time in his life when he pretended to be an accomplished artist to get an ill-fated job at a correspondence school. A ten-year old child prodigy has an unsettling conversation on a cruise ship in which he appears to predict his own demise.

Those are very brief summaries of the tales comprising Nine Stories, a short fiction collection by legendary author J. D. Salinger. Published shortly after the Second World War, that cathartic event infuses many of these stories, either directly or indirectly, as many of the characters have been affected by the loss of loved ones or the challenges of returning to civilian life. The collection is also notable for offering glimpses into complex situations where details are often not revealed fully until the end, if at all. Instead, much of the narrative development takes place through dialogue rather than direct action. This stylistic choice gives the reader a sense of eavesdropping on the various scenes, which proves to be a very effective device, mainly because the author is so good at writing conversations that real people might have actually had with one another. While all the selections were good, there were a few that were truly outstanding and elegiac in their own way, including “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, “For Esme-With Love and Squalor”, and “The Laughing Man”. Overall, this is a book that is thoroughly original and one that has clearly stood the test of time. ( )

i was sick in bed with my first autumn cold of eighth grade (not that i am anything as glamorous as "sickly" just vaguely weak in constitution), and my brother Owen brought me _Nine Stories_ to read. i was pretty sure i should pretend i'd already read it because there was something like a secret Salinger cult operating in my house, and frankly, i felt (more than) a little left-out. so i humbled myself, accepted the invitation/offering (even better than a cool lima bean!), and eventually distinguished myself as the most zealous and irrational member of said cult. yay! ( )