Among the Salinger-obsessed, this much-hyped book from David Shields and Shane Salerno, who also directed the documentary, is already being treated like the literary equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. The latter question is perhaps more essential in regard to Salinger than any other 20th century American writer, for in his four slim books — “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” — he sought to offer instructions for living, producing less stories per se than parables, or koans. The new additions to the Salinger library will also include what “Salinger” calls a “manual” of Vedanta, the Hindu philosophy Salinger followed during the second half of his life, as well as a novel and a novella inspired by his experiences as a member of the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in World War II. This is not a new theory; it was explored in Kenneth Slawenski's disappointing 2011 biography “J.D. Miller — the inspiration for his short story “For Esmé — With Love & Squalor,” speaks about the five-year relationship in great detail for the first time in “Salinger,” including how it abruptly ended the morning after she lost her virginity to the writer. “Certain things, they should stay the way they are,” Holden Caulfield says at one point in “The Catcher in the Rye.” “You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” 
 
 Evidently, with J.D.
– If you thought the recent revelation that five new JD Salinger books are due out was juicy, well, you haven't seen anything yet. That tidbit came compliments of Salinger the book and Salinger the documentary, which were written/directed by David Shields and Shane Salerno and are both due out next week. While Jen Chaney calls that news "certainly the biggest bombshell," she drops a few of her own in the Washington Post, which got a copy of the book. Chief among them: He became a recluse in part because he only had one testicle. Shields and Salerno sourced this detail from two unnamed women and an Army pal of Salinger's; they claim it's why he tended to be with younger women (the book recounts his relationship with Jean Miller, who caught the then-30-year-old's eye when she was 14), and write that "surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare was to reduce the likelihood that this information about his anatomy would emerge." Another claim that Chaney notes is based on "speculative" evidence: That Salinger annulled his first marriage after finding out Sylvia Welter informed for the Gestapo. (Click for more tidbits.) Meanwhile, in a review for the LA Times, David Ulin gives credit to Salerno and Shields for getting "the goods, digging up information on Salinger's war buddies," but faults them for packing chapters with "a litany of names without attribution, leaving us unsure from whom we're hearing and why."