Salinger blog

Salinger by Randy Mora

Salinger blog

BIOGRAPHY

 JANUARY 30, 2010 | BY SRB

Alan Taylor – 30th January 2010

Recently, while researching a long piece on Bob Dylan, I read that in the 1960s Dylan was offered the part of Holden Caufield in a never-realised film version of The Catcher In The Rye. Anyone who has seen the young Dylan at his most brattish in DA Pennebaker’s rockumentary Dont Look Back will know he had a Caufieldesque hauteur, a lipcurling disdain for showbiz phonies; ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ could Holden’s philosophy set to music (“Because something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”). The film never happened, and Salinger’s great interface with rock came not by way of the movies but a murder: infamously, John Lennon’s assassin was obsessed with The Catcher In The Rye.

Appointment in Arezzo / A friendship with Muriel Spark / Synopsis

Appointment in Arezzo

A friendship with Muriel Spark

by Alan Taylor

Synopsis

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscrete and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. In Appointment in Arezzo Alan Taylor sets the record straight about this and many other things.

With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists.

The book is published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.

KOBO