PHILIP ROTH

Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the second-child of middle-class Jewish American parents. He had a suburban upbringing. The suburbs and its people have served as a subject for many of his novels, which he began writing after graduating from the University of Chicago. Prior, he attended Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He then continued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, receiving masters in English literature. He briefly worked as an instructor in the University of Chicago’s writing program and taught creative writing at Princeton University and University of Iowa. Later, he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1991.

Exit Ghost
Houghton Mifflin
 LAN Ang R ROT
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer : no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude.

Also available : American pastoral, The plot against America, The human stain, The dying animal, Indignation, Everyman.

J.D. SALINGER

J D Salinger was born in 1919. He grew up in New York City, and wrote short stories from an early age, but his breakthrough came in 1948 with the publication in The New Yorker of ’A Perfect Day for Bananafish’. The Catcher in the Rye was his first and only novel, published in 1951. It remains one of the most translated, taught and reprinted texts, and has sold some 65 million copies. It was followed by three other books of short stories and novellas, the most recent of which was published in 1963. He lives in Cornish, New Hampshire.

The Catcher in the rye
Penguin (Fiction)
 LAN Ang R SAL
The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the ’phony’ aspects of society, and the ’phonies’ themselves : the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection. Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it’s a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all).

Also available : Nine stories.