Five New JD Salinger Novels

Really interesting story in The New York Times this weekend that apparently five new JD Salinger novels are on their way beginning in 2015. Why 2015? Well that'll be five years after Salinger's death so presumably that was a stipulation of the old boy's will, whose faithful executor is his son Matt...
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What are the five new Salinger novels about? Well the Times really has no idea but apparently two anonymous sources have revealed to Shane Salerno (the director of a new biographical film 

a rare photo of Staff Sergeant Salinger

about Salinger's life) some intriguing details. One of the books is going to be "a story-filled manual of Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved with" which doesn't, admittedly, sound so terrific. Another book is going to contain several new stories about the Glass family who have already featured in Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High The Roof Beams & Seymour An Introduction. For those of you who, like me, struggled to say awake through the latter book this will not be particularly welcome news either. But it's not all doom and gloom: apparently there's also a novel or a collection of stories set in Holden Caulfield's extended family which is quite exciting to me because they really are an interesting bunch: Holden, DB, Phoebe and even poor Allie were all smart, introspective and funny writers. Another Caulfield family book? Maybe even a sequel to Catcher in the Rye? Yes, please. 
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But the bit of the story that made me choke on my Cornflakes on Sunday morning was the news that Salinger has written not one but two World War 2 novels. JD Salinger, as I've blogged about before here, had a very interesting war...He was in the Counterintelligence Corps and participated in D Day, the Normandy campaign, the liberation of at least one concentration camp and he also fought in the notorious Battle of Hurtgen Forest. In another well known incident JD Salinger and Ernest Hemingway together "helped liberate" the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Even a mediocre writer could make a good book out of that material and Salinger, well...
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There's not much to look forward to in these troubled times but if despair is making you think about jumping in front of a train I'd say don't do it. At least not now. There will be a new Patrick Leigh Fermor book out in September, a new Coen Brothers film out in December, Paul Thomas Anderson's version of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice will be out in late 2014 and best of all the first of five new JD Salinger novels hits the shelves in 2015. That's got to be worth waiting around for, no?