For Esme With Love and Splendour and Other Stories - J.D. Salinger

'For Esmé with Love and Squalor' is a classic collection of short stories by JD Salinger and was first published in 1953. The book runs to 148 pages and features nine different stories. Anyone who has read Catcher In The Rye but no other Salinger works should definitely get around to reading 'For Esmé with Love and Squalor'. It's the most readable and accessible of his other books and quite brilliant at times. The stories are sometimes dark, sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, but all crackle with Salinger's invention, wonderful dialogue and sarcastic humour. 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' begins 'For Esmé with Love and Squalor'. It's a ...  Read the complete review

Aren't short stories, erm, convenient!? I meet a lot of people whom, like myself, have an attention span the length of a piece of string that happens to have been cut very short. Most of these people, like myself, have been reading the same novel for seven and a half years and phsically decay at the sight of War and Peace. However, as well as writing a novel called 'A Catcher in the Rye' that took me (cor blimey!) two days to read, J.D. Salinger wrote this little stunner - For Esme - With Love and Squaler and Other Stories. It's a book of short stories that are perfect for the kicking and screaming short attention span club! The stories, naturally, are ...  Read the complete review

The short stories by J.D Salinger give a different view of the strange period after the Second World War - a time that seems to pale into insignificance next to the war and events that came later. Having read the cult ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ I was advised to read ‘For Esme With Love and Squalor’ because I was intrigued by Salinger as a person and as a writer. His style in ‘For Esme’ is never quite as stylised as it is in narrating the few days of wilderness of the young Holden Caulfield in ‘Catcher in the Rye’, but maintains a kind of coldness and mystery, as well as perfectly, and uneasily, depicting the ...  Read the complete review