With Love and Squalor: 13 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger

Fourteen writers reflect on the impact of J.D. Salinger's oeuvre on their lives and work in With Love and Squalor, edited by literary agent Kip Kotzen and Open City founding editor Thomas Beller (The Sleepover Artist). Walter Kirn recalls having Catcher in the Rye snatched from his hands and hurled across the college dining hall immediately after John Lennon's murder by Mark David Chapman; Chapman believed the book gave him permission for the killing. Emma Forrest describes her effort to become the kind of young person "" `invented' in the fifties by the two J.D.s Salinger and James Dean"" in order to deliver the goods to her newspaper editor. Lucinda Rosenfeld weighs Franny and Zooey's unimpressive rebellions against what she sees as the nearly perfect prose of their eponymous book. (Oct. 16)