THIS is a big week for followers of JD Salinger.
A new biography is published tomorrow that claims the famously reclusive author, pictured, left at least four new works to be published from 2015 onwards.
The same revelation is made in an accompanying documentary released later in the week.
The stash of material is alleged to include a collection of stories entitled The Family Glass, about the fictional Glass family featured in Franny And Zooey; a story-filled "manual" of the Vedanta religious philosophy (Salinger is known to have been interested in Eastern religion); a novel set during the Second World War and partly based on his first marriage to a German woman, who may have spied for the Gestapo; and - tantalisingly - a new collection of stories featuring the Caulfield family, immortalised in The Catcher In The Rye.
It is like discovering that JK Rowling has a clutch of new novels in one of those famous tree houses in her garden (or maybe hidden in a cuckoo's nest).
Or that Dickens wrote a collection of stories about the Copperfields that have only just come to light (and how appropriate that would be, given the opening of Catcher).
On balance, let's hope it's true. While the memory cockroaches have eaten away the details, I know I liked the Glass family the first time around.
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters remains a fabulous book title - and the act of those words being written in lipstick on a mirror to celebrate the return of a sibling has always struck me as a perfect example of family love.
Do we want more Holden? Surely, yes. He was wise beyond his years, and there's a historic charm to pre-internet, pre-mobile writing.
It won't detract from Catcher, whose essential image - the image of the title - surely remains as sweet and touching today as it did all those years ago. What could be more worthwhile than stopping children falling off a cliff?
Talking of the title, amid all the mass of material being written about Salinger, let's not forget one of the oddities of the literary world, a quirk that links Salinger and his fellow giant of American letters, John Steinbeck.
Two of the most studied, most set, most familiar of novels - The Catcher In The Rye and Of Mice And Men - both take their titles from words (tweaked in Salinger's case) by Burns. What might a modern-day Holden make of that?
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