Word: bananafish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first of that early trifecta of New Yorker stories was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which we first meet Seymour, the eldest of the Glass children. It's the last day of his life, and he appears in just the final pages, talking with a little girl on a beach in Florida - one of the many radiant children in Salinger's work - and bringing her out into the ocean in a fond but also slightly dangerous way, and then returning to the hotel room where his new bride, who has been on the phone earlier assuring her mother that...
...perfect day for bananafish, but inclement for scholars and publishers. On Jan. 29, 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York City, ruled that the reclusive author J.D. Salinger could prevent quotation of his unpublished letters by a biographer. The decision (which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review) went further. The biographer, Ian Hamilton, could not even describe the correspondence in such a way that it caught the spirit of Salinger's writing. Hamilton found himself, in the words of the court, with "no inherent right to copy the 'accuracy' or the 'vividness...
...with Love and Squalor suffers from a case of nerves not unlike the symptoms Salinger described in a letter to Hemingway. Models are identified for members of the Glass family, the precocious and haunting characters who ride the time loops of stories as early as A Perfect Day for Bananafish and as late as Seymour: An $ Introduction. The year the fiction stopped, 1965, is the point at which Hamilton ends his account...
Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is a timely and masterful foray into the practice and penetralia of this modern mystery religion. Timely because since the golden age of piety of the fifties--when Salinger's Seymour Glass frolicked blithely with bananafish while his new bride chatted with her mother about what all the "goddam" analysts thought about that peculiar young man--psychoanalysis has been receding from, the public eye. After these years of gestalt therapy, est, and, yes, hot tubs (who can really believe that a neighborhood of fools sitting in a tub of scalding water is therapy...
...upstate New York girl's college; Walker is a priest; Boo Boo a Westchester matron; Zooey a rising TV actor; and Franny a college student. The greatest of them all, however, was Seymour, who committed suicide on vacation in an earlier Salinger story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish...