I am among those who describe J. D. Salinger as America's least-heard-from, most-missed-author.

I don't know why he stopped writing. Maybe he thought he had said all he had to say. And in these "Nine Stories," he certainly said it all, and so eloquently.

My favorite three stories are (in descending order): "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"; "After the War with the Eskimos"; and "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes."

"Bananafish" speaks for itself. After reading "Franny and Zooey" (certainly the most brilliant treatise on Christianity ever written, my apologies to C. S. Lewis) and "Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters", I understood why certain people (like Seymour Glass) are just too beautiful for this world.

"After the War with the Eskimos" can't help but touch the heart of anyone who ever loved Holden Caulfield.

"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" inspired me to write a story which, I fear, is terribly derivitive. My characters sound a lot more like "The Sopranos" than J. D.'s upper-crusty New Yorkers, but the pathos is the same. Salinger understands the human heart. Maybe that's why he is so silent.

To be truthful, I had never been a big fan of Salinger's before I read this book. Personally, I found Catcher in the Rye to be overly dramatic and very cold. Two story-killing traits that are not found in Nine Stories.

What is so appealing about Nine Stories is the way Salinger weaves a fantastic story, sometimes without even coming out and saying it. Whereas other authors would fill you in on the precursors to the events discussed in a story, Salinger would rather pick up at a certain point in a conflict, and allow the reader to draw his/her own conclusions from there. One prime example of this is found in "Pretty Mouth and Green my Eyes", where the main characters discuss a court case--keeping in mind that Salinger has not said the two were lawyers. This type of "fill yourself in" reading is very appealing and allows for a more incompassing and involved reading experience.

The book features a fantastic line-up of wonderfully written tales, filled with everyday people and everyday problems. It is Salingers way of making these stories so applicaple to the reader's life that makes the stories so fascinating.

Yet one of the most appealing aspects of these short stories is Salinger's ability to keep his down to earth writing stile in a yin and yang balance with Light, airy banter between his characters. These stories allow the reader to really delve into a character's depth through their dialogue alone--a detail that is very rare inthe literature realm.

Every story is simply fantastic. This is truely a gratifying read.

Before he became a curmudgeonly hermit on the level of a B. Traven or a Thomas Pynchon, Salinger was a close and sympathetic observer of youth and life amongst the New York upper-middle classes. The short stories he wrote from the early 40s through the late 50s placed him among the ranks of the best practitioners of the art. In all, Salinger wrote approximately two dozen short stories, most of which appeared within the pages of "The NewYorker," along with those of his contemporary John Cheever, who was exploring the same territory but with a different emphasis. Salinger specialized in quirky, high-quality tales spiced with equal amounts humor, philosophy, yearning, and sadness, and the far-too-few stories in this volume are a good representative of his work. The emotional trauma of WWII - something which affected him personally and perhaps contributed to the man he is now - is depicted in differing ways in such stories as "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", "For Esme - With Love and Squalor," and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" is written almost entirely as dialogue, "The Laughing Man" takes as its theme the magic of story-telling, while "Down at the Dinghy" and "Teddy" illustrate Salinger's famous empathy with children. It's a pity and a mystery that Salinger only included nine of his many wonderful stories in this volume. Apparently, to this day he refuses to allow any of his stories to be reprinted in anthologies, and has withdrawn permission to keep his stories in new editions of such older anthologies as "Short Story Masterpieces" or "Fifty Great Short Stories." It's as if Salinger the artist for the last forty years has practiced a type of Zen self-abnegation, erasing not just his present but his past. Why write if you don't want to be read? What purpose, other than self-therapy, does art serve without an audience? (But don't despair. If you surf the samizdat of the net carefully, you'll find other stories by Salinger.)

It seems silly to talk about the literary merits of this book of Salinger's short stories. He's a master writer with complex characters and fantastic dialogue. These stories are populated with vintage Salinger characters: high society intellectuals who have everything in the world but happiness. Although I didn't enjoy NINE STORIES as much as I liked CATCHER IN THE RYE and didn't love most of the characters as much as I loved the characters in FRANNY & ZOOEY, there are a few gems. "The Laughing Man," in which the narrator recalls his Comanche Chief (like a Boy Scout leader) and the way he enchanted the troop with his magnificent stories until his adult world crashed the party, seemed particularly relatable for some reason. And "For Esmé--With Love and Squalor," a story written by a traumatized soldier to a young girl he met on leave, is a charming and disturbing story. Overall, a very fine collection.

One of the books I've returned to several times, often to just one or two of the stories that I know I can count for a good time. Despite having such a limited output, I can say without hesitation that Salinger is one of my favorites. I especially appreciate the Glass family stories. I love the way the mundane becomes so real and interesting,and often funny. Check it out!, even if you're not a fan of short stories.