Will We Ever Learn What’s in J.D. Salinger’s Safe?

“Conflicting accounts have emerged of what Salinger’s been doing in the years since the 1965 publication of his last story in The New Yorker, “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Since then, he’s been holed up in a hilltop house in New Hampshire, and I’ve heard unofficial reports that he’s produced several novels whose manuscripts have been stashed in a bank’s safe-deposit vault.  Or that there are manuscript pages stacked to the ceiling in his house but no certainty about their state of completion.”   Story from Slate.com

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Draws J.D. Salinger Suit

From NY Times:

“Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF

In “The Catcher in the Rye,” the narrator Holden Caulfield warns his readers to beware of phonies, and his creator, J. D. Salinger, evidently still believes in that caution. On Monday Mr. Salinger, the reclusive author, filed suit against the writer and the publisher of a planned book cast as a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Reuters reported. In an interview in The Telegraph, the author, John David California, said that his novel, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” would feature a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield’s escape from an elite prep school. In The Telegraph, Mr. California said that Mr. Salinger was “a great writer who influenced the entire world with the words he made up” and that his novel was “a tribute the way Holden would have said it.” In the suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, lawyers for Mr. Salinger said, “The sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple,” according to Reuters.”

New Tolkien Book 36 Yrs After Death

“Truly, J.R.R. Tolkien is the Tupac Shakur of the literary world. His son Christopher has once again raided the fell barrow where his corpse resides and found still another unpublished manuscript there, entitled The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. It goes on sale today…The new book is definitely a legitimate, heretofore unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, consisting of two long narrative poems written in a traditional Norse meter.”     Story

More Crichton Novels Coming

“The Harper-Collins publishing house said a completed novel called “Pirate Latitudes,” an adventure story set in Jamaica in 1665, was discovered in Crichton’s files after this death and will be published this November…The second book, to be published in late 2010, is a technological thriller “which explores the outer edges of new science and technology.”    Full Story