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The King Is Dead. Long Live the King’s Back Catalog

J.D. Salinger got wood from shutting down efforts to republish his early New Yorker and Story magazine shorts. He loved fucking with small publishers. He famously pulled the rug out from under a number of small presses for hair splitting reasons after arduous negotiations to republish his early work. Books were printed and waiting to ship and Jerry scotched the deal over a nitpick on the cover art.

I’m not emotionally invested in this fight because I grabbed a bitorrent of the complete pre-Catcher Salinger catalog off Pirate Bay, circa 1998. I got mine, to hell with everybody else.

Well, as the poets assert, Jerry is smoking a turd in Purgatory these days and his estate is ready to get PAID, home dogs.

Once more into the breach, but with reduced chance of Jerry climbing out of the grave and shitting on the deal. The much-rumored “prequels” (more like early sketchbook drafts) to Catcher in the Rye have been released as an e-book.

The Young Folks, (Story magazine, 1940), Go See Eddie, (University of Kansas City Review, 1940) and Once a Week Won’t Kill You, (Story, 1944) can be downloaded now from Devault-Graves Digital Editions.

If you want to delve a bit further into Holden, Holden’s older brother, and the prewar New York “scene” that fostered both the hero of Catcher in the Rye as well as the Glass Family stories, you better download it quick before the crabby old bastard’s ghost brings down the server.


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