Books by J D Salinger

“One of my all-time favourite Salinger stories is “The Laughing Man.” In the story, one of the characters is crushed because his girlfriend left him. He shares his emotional situation and heartbreak by telling stories to the children in his Comanche Club troop. The story is told from the perspective of a kid, who doesn’t fully understand what the storyteller is going through, but he’s moved emotionally by the story in which the laughing man dies. I first read “The Laughing Man” when I was a high school student, before I began writing myself. And it struck me: this is a story about a kid being heartbroken because a heartbroken adult tells him a story. It’s transferring to me the heartbreak of Salinger, who made up both these characters. After that, I was never able to read a story without thinking of the frame through which the story is being told.” Read more...

The Best 20th-Century Short Stories

Etgar Keret, Short Story Writer

“This is the only book I read when I was a young adult. I believed it was cursed for me—it was the book I read directly before I had a breakdown. I thought that somehow reading the book had triggered my breakdown. I found Holden when I felt exactly the same as he did. When he was with his sister he wanted to be a child, but he was being thrust into this adult world. And he didn’t want to be. And that’s where so much of my anxiety came from too. I remember reading it. I’ve still got the same copy that I had then and there are little paragraphs and sentences that I’d ringed. With Holden I discovered that there were other people that felt the way I did. When I found out that it had been written so long ago, I found something comforting about that. Before I read this book, it felt to me, that I was alone and going through something unique and unknown. But apparently others, even in the far past had had the same experience. So I took from it that this was a rite of passage—this time was difficult for most people. It was a transformative book for me. And I love it for that. It explained things for me at a time when I couldn’t have explained them myself.” Read more...

The best books on Teenage Mental Health

Rae Earl, Memoirist