your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer… 
Hey Father Death, I'm flying home Hey poor man, you're all alone Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going Father Death, Don't cry any more Mama's there, underneath the floor Brother Death, please mind the store Old Aunty Death I hear your… 
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says,… 
...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you… 
Bella's voice said: "Come in," faintly; then she said: "Oh—it's locked." The key scratched in the lock and the door opened and I went into the room. It was very hot in there. It was dark, with only a little light from a gas heater.… 
In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to… 
Every route had its traps and only the regular carriers knew of them. Each day it was another god damned thing, and you were always ready for a rape, murder, dogs, or insanity of some sort. The regulars wouldn't tell you their little secrets. That… 
The apartment house lobby was empty this time. No gunman waiting under the potted palm to give me orders. I took the automatic elevator up to my floor and walked along the hallway to the tune of a muted radio behind a door. I needed… 
"And in spring water, minerals may have been added or removed and it's usually filtered, not processed." I pause. "Seventy-five percent of all bottled water in America is actually spring water." I pause again, then ask the cab, "Did anyone know that?" A long, soulless… 
Finally, he rolled her over upon her stomach: "I must have a look at this lovely ass," he murmered. And after having scanned it: "Jesus Christ! What matchless buttocks!" And then he opened them, kissed them, and we distinctly saw him place his tongue in… 
There are so many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to… 
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything… 
"Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the… 
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting… 
More BookBytes on alienation...
Two years ago, on January 27th, Jerome David Salinger died of natural causes in his home in New Hampshire. We all know his famous work 'The Catcher in the Rye', which was preceded by a series of short stories that centers around the characters of the fictive Caulfield family. Holden, of course, became the most famous one. 'Franny and Zoey', a novel which consists of two parts, is lesser know. However, because we like all characters Salinger created, we have included a lot of scenes from this novel too in our database!
The sad thing about Salinger is that he tried to live in seclusion, outside of media attention, yet 'friends', students, journalists and fellow writers published all kinds of trivial memoirs and letters just to get attention themselves.
Over here at BookBytes we will let Salinger's love of writing speak for itself:
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Girls in literature. Wonderful descriptions of the female sex.
Ernest Hemingway - There Was N...
Ernest Hemingway - There Was N...Vladimir Nabokov - A Double Va...
Don DeLillo - The Texas Highwa...
Allen Ginsberg - Father Death ...
