If You Really Want to Hear About It

Famously reclusive and yet an undying source of inspiration for generations of readers, Salinger is one of the greatest mysteries of American literature. This is the first comprehensive collection of writings about J. D. Salinger and his work, an amalgam of over fifty years’ worth of attempted interviews, documented sightings, unauthorized profiles, and stifled cries of devotion, as well as the best of the book reviews.

If You Really Want to Hear About It includes a never-before-published retrospective by Joyce Maynard, whose 1997 memoir, which documented her year-long affair with Salinger when she was sixteen-years-old, caused a rupture in the literary establishment.

Contributors include Betty Eppes, Michiko Kakutani, Alfred Kazin, Joyce Maynard, Mary McCarthy, Arthur Mizener, George Plimpton, Joanna Smith Rakoff, Ron Rosenbaum, Margaret Salinger, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Jonathan Yardley and many others.