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  • Published: 19 November 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984758
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

The Catcher in the Rye




One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century - reissued in a stunning hardback design to celebrate the Salinger centenary

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school. Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature: an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

  • Published: 19 November 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241984758
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger, born New York City, Jan. 1, 1919, established his reputation on the basis of a single novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), whose principal character, Holden Caulfield, epitomized the growing pains of a generation of high school and college students. The public attention that followed the success of the book led Salinger to move from New York to the remote hills of Cornish, N.H. Before that he had published only a few short stories; one of them, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1949, introduced readers to Seymour Glass, a character who subsequently figured in Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Salinger's only other published books. Of his 35 published short stories, those which Salinger wishes to preserve are collected in Nine Stories (1953).

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Praise for The Catcher in the Rye

I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.

Samuel Beckett

He wrote a perfect novel and it changed US culture forever

Independent

His work meant a lot to me when I was a young person and his writing still sings.

Dave Eggers

It was a very pure voice he had. There was no one like him

Martin Amis

He was the poet of youthful alienation before youth really knew what that was

Sunday Times

Tough-tender... It charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel [in] acidly humorous deadpan satire

TIME