Sergeant Salinger

MASTERWORK FROM A RENOWNED CHRONICLER OF REAL AND IMAGINED LIVES: Charyn, lauded by the New Yorker for "skillfully breath[ing] life into historical icons" has published a number of recent, popular novels fictionalizing the lives of Teddy Roosevelt, Jerzy Kosinski, Abraham Lincoln, and Emily Dickinson, but it was J.D. Salinger who first captured his imagination. In high school, Charyn was told he "looked just like Jerry" before falling in love with Salinger's short stories. His attempts to understand the man behind the myth led to Charyn's 2019 cover story in Forward magazine, "J.D. Salinger: The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy," and now to this brilliant novel that opens with Salinger's prewar love affair with Oona O'Neill (who jilted him for Charlie Chaplin), follows him through unforgettable wartime scenes, including a fateful meeting with Ernest Hemingway, and onto an uneasy homecoming.

COMPANION TO CHARYN'S ACCLAIMED WWII AXIS NOVEL CESARE : Sergeant Salinger is an Allied counterpart to Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin , Charyn's most recent novel written from the perspective of Germans during WWII. It spares none of the gritty, disturbing details of Salinger's wartime experiences in Europe, from a mass-murder covered-up during a training exercise in Slapton Sands, England, to scenes of brutal interrogations, to horrific combat and harrowing narrow escapes. As Salinger copes with army SNAFUs and war's grim absurdities, his status allows him to get away with deviating from orders, leading to surreal and sometimes farcical encounters and outcomes. Charyn is a master of the grotesque and the extreme, which he integrates seamlessly into descriptions of war's tedium.

UNEARTHS THE RAW MATERIAL FOR J.D. SALINGER'S MOST FAMOUS FICTION: In Sergeant Salinger , Charyn explores Salinger's traumatic wartime experience while he was writing The Catcher in the Rye and accumulating the real-life experience that informs his celebrated story, "For Esm�--with Love and Squalor." The publication of Sergeant Salinger will coincide with the 70th anniversary publication of The Catcher in the Rye.