Thomas Beller Knihy

Here, in a vibrant and edgy collection, are brave and personal truths from men and women in their twenties in the 1990s. Here are tales of romantic entanglements in cyberspace; of entrepreneurial invention; of a madcap search for the perfect job...and the perfect love. Alongside stories of a Catholic single mother or a philosophical boxer come musings on a Southern roadtrip gone haywire and on a hilarious Midwestern childhood. These twenty writers take the particulars of their own rocky road toward adulthood and make them palpable, real, and universal.

A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme. Three years after his death at ninety-one, J.D. Salinger remains our most mythic writer. The Catcher in the Rye became an American classic, and he was for a long time the writer for The New Yorker. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters introduced, by way of the Glass family, a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, voluble cast of characters whose stage is the Upper East Side of New York. But fame proved a burden, and in 1953 Salinger fled to New Hampshire, spending the next half century in isolation. Beller has followed his subject's trail, from his Park Avenue childhood to his final refuge, barnstorming across New England to visit various Salinger shrines, interviewing just about everyone alive who ever knew Salinger. The result is a quest biography in the tradition of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, a book as much about the biographer as about the subject—two vivid, entertaining stories in one.

Im bürgerlichen Milieu amerikanischer Grossstädte angesiedelte Kurzgeschichten, in deren Mittelpunkt der schwierige Übergang der orientierungslosen Jugendlichen ins Erwachsenenleben steht.