Unpublished J. D. Salinger Stories Leaked On Bittorrent Site 218
192_kbps writes "Catcher in the Rye author J. D. Salinger wrote the short story The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls and left depository copies with a few academic libraries with the understanding that the work would not see mass distribution until the mid-21st century. The only authorized place to read the story is in a special reading room at Princeton where electronics are not allowed and a librarian continuously babysits the reader. A PDF of the story, as well as two other unpublished stories, appeared on private bittorrent site what.cd where a huge bounty had been placed for the work. Incredibly, the uploader (or someone connected to the uploader) bought an unauthorized copy on eBay for a pittance. The file, Three Stories, is making the bittorrent rounds but can also be read on mediafire."
That's terrible... Salinger won't write any more! (Score:5, Funny)
This is a great example of where copyright helps to encourage authors to write more. The fact that this copy has been leaked, and pirated massively means that Salinger has no incentive to write any more! We need to punish the perpetrators thoroughly.
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Writing your story posthumously is the best way to keep it secret.
Re:That's terrible... Salinger won't write any mor (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great example of where copyright helps to encourage authors to write more. The fact that this copy has been leaked, and pirated massively means that Salinger has no incentive to write any more! We need to punish the perpetrators thoroughly.
It is a disincentive to trust your unpublished manuscripts, papers and memoirs to Princeton --- it is easier to speak candidly if no one living will have to bear the consequences.
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Maybe Princeton shouldn't be in the business of playing gatekeeper to a dead man's paranoiac death wishes about publication. If Salinger was a serial killer or a despot, would Princeton feel morally obliged to follow his wishes about what he wanted published after his death?
The fact that copyright lasts for the author's life "+ X years" where X gets increased every time it nearly expires means that we have infinite copyright, which is blatantly unconstitutional, and definitely contrary to the original stat
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Maybe Princeton shouldn't be in the business of playing gatekeeper to a dead man's paranoiac death wishes about publication. .
what.cd admins took down the file out of respect to the author as well. Princeton's not the only gatekeeper in this story.
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. The fact that this copy has been leaked, and pirated massively means that Salinger has no incentive to write any more!
Unless it was his intent that this work be massively pirated. Creating a cookie jar that Must Not Be Opened is a great way to get people to open it and generate free publicity for whatever they find inside. I have zero clue about whatever Salinger might have been thinking.
But what I've heard of the "rules" for this work (in order to read this stuff, you had to sit in a particular room and be watched by a nanny) does make it sound like the point of the game was to break the rules.
Whoooo.... (Score:5, Insightful)
.....oooooosh.
Re:That's terrible... Salinger won't write any mor (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody understands copyright law.
Re:That's terrible... Salinger won't write any mor (Score:5, Funny)
That is why Nobody is highly regarded as an expert witness in copyright cases.
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I'm thinking of changing my name to Nobody. Aside from causing general confusion I could easily make a living suing people for defamation. "Nobody would be that stupid" - now you owe me $$$ for damaging my reputation!
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Didn't stop Tupac.
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That story mentioned in the summary about the baseball player is supposed to be good, I hear. I've never read it. Something like "Field of Dreams".
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Really.
Catcher is a fine thing. Even if it were misused to program "lone crazed gunmen".
But really, Salinger. You are a bizarre and maladjusted narcissistic twat. It's one thing NOT to publish - or even burn your own work. But being so fucking precious as to specify conditions of release? Fuck you, Sir. In the most sanctimonious way possible.
Re: That's terrible... Salinger won't write any m (Score:2)
That's a bit harsh. Did you say the same thing when Samuel Clemens's autobiography was released, 100 years after his death?
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Yes.
Crap.
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If it wasn't for Mark David Chapman, how many people would even know about the "Catcher In The Rye"?
Seeing as how it's been on the highschool reading list for half a centruy already, I'm guessing at least 50 million?
Oh sorry, my bad. I thought you asked about how many people read the "Catcher In The Rye".
As for how many knowing about it, probably vast majority of English speaking world, 400 million, give or take.
Links (Score:5, Informative)
https://kickass.to/three-stories-j-d-salinger-pdf-t8257205.html [kickass.to]
https://torcache.net/torrent/ED8F9DE4B9151B3B0E5B998CAF7A124E9E7B0E17.torrent?title=%5Bkickass.to%5Dthree.stories.j.d.salinger.pdf [torcache.net]
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ED8F9DE4B9151B3B0E5B998CAF7A124E9E7B0E17&dn=three+stories+j+d+salinger+pdf&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337
Slashdot fucks up magnet links, but the hash is right there: ED8F9DE4B9151B3B0E5B998CAF7A124E9E7B0E17
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I would not click these links. My understanding is the rights to his unpublished works are held in a trust which may start publishing some of them as early as 2015. The guy was pretty crazy at the end, and the people around him pretty litigious; who knows what the folks managing the trust might do about this. I would not want any IP address I could be associated with anywhere near anyone one of these links.
Maybe Peter Norton will ride on in on a white horse to save Salinger again somehow, that would be f
Ain't skeered (Score:3)
I'm all over these torrents. What are they going to do, sue me? Let me see - me and about 3000 other seeders, and a few hundred leeches. I don't own anything worth taking, and my working life is nearing an end - what do you think they can gain by suing me?
Funny thing - all the working magnets seem to be DHT and PeX. Interesting that. I wonder how many are using anonymizing programs on their torrent clients? Ha! Glancing through the list of peers, a fair number are coming through proxies that
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Hmmm - your "conversation" might continue thus:
"Damn, J.D, you wrote some godawful shite here - my nephew could have written a better story! I guess you never did properly mature as an author. I was hoping that your final works would be worth reading. Oh well, maybe in whatever passes for your next life, you've actually learned how to write."
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Since Salinger is dead, there is no moral reason to honor his wishes. He doesn't care -- he's dead.
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Considering that the projected release date is in 2060, perhaps he doesn't expect to be alive when it finally happens. He can either grab it while it's available or never read it at all.
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They can't really do anything about you downloading the stories, only uploading.
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Thank Goodness... (Score:4, Insightful)
I love this socialist half-paradise, where Wall Street profits are privatized, gigantic losses from gambling with people's deposits are publicly insured, and intellectual works are treated like a turkey thrown into a pit filled with hyenas.
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I could see it being a problem if he were alive: if someone doesn't want something released, and it gets leaked anyway, it can cause various kinds of negative effects for the person (unwanted attention, etc.). But he's been dead for years, so I'm having trouble seeing the harm here.
Re:Thank Goodness... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say yes – if I a person does not want their work to be published and I will stand on this issue on principle.
The man did not want his works to be published at this time. I can think of other cases where diarist who things that they did not to be released until ALL affected parties were dead which may not be until decades after the person has died. If a person does not want their work published now it should not be forced. It is the right thing to do.
Now if we are talking about copyright and compensation issues - that’s a different ball of wax. I would have to say no to that.
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But these works are available in a reading room. So issues of privacy or needing to protect some IP are moot. Its totally an issue of distribution rights. Not that these shouldn't be addressed. But in a world where mass publication is starting to look a lot different than Salinger ever conceived of, how can we determine his intent? Perhaps he didn't want some heirs to profit from his works, in which case Bittorrent distribution might have been perfectly OK with him.
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As a person who is interested in history I have to disagree.
People who write for themselves or for some imaginary future audience write differently for public consumption. Some people are more open in privacy then in the spotlight. They tend to be more frank, expressing concerns, and exploring odd alleys of thought. If, as you say they, “fuck the dog”, I want to know about it. Or at the very least preserved for posterity’s sake.
Think of Ann Frank’s diary. Read up on Mother Teresa
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If someone doesn't want their work published they shouldn't put it on paper.
It's really that simple.
That's why Hari Seldon used a time locked vault to make his announcements ;)
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When a man is dead, does he still possess the right to control his work?
Re:Thank Goodness... (Score:4, Informative)
No, his heirs do, for a time at least. See also: Christopher Tolkein.
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Re:Thank Goodness... (Score:5, Funny)
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"When a man is dead, does he still possess the right to control his work?"
The evil that men do lives after them;. The good is oft interrèd with their bones... Mark Anthony is dead, so he doesn't get to control who says that line.
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I love this socialist half-paradise, where Wall Street profits are privatized, gigantic losses from gambling with people's deposits are publicly insured, and intellectual works are treated like a turkey thrown into a pit filled with hyenas.
I love your graphic description, but you should get your concepts straight. Wall Street wouldn't have existed in a Socialist state, and they would have been more likely to socialise than privatise.
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...we wouldn't want to respect the wishes of an author so widely admired. He put words on paper, so fuck him. They stopped belonging to him when they saw the light of day.
I love this socialist half-paradise, where Wall Street profits are privatized, gigantic losses from gambling with people's deposits are publicly insured, and intellectual works are treated like a turkey thrown into a pit filled with hyenas.
I haven't read it yet but what if he is a time traveller?!?!? And he wrote about his secret in this story?!???!!! And its somehow important to his timeline that noone know until 2060???!!!!???! Did anyone think of that?? Huh?
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If he doesn't agree, he's free to protest it.
Huh? Oh, he's dead? Then why the fuck should he care? Oh, his kids (or whoever inherited the "rights" to it)? Why the fuck should they have any rights to it in the first place? What rights do the kids of the architect designing my house have, what's their say when I decide to tear down part of it and remodel it? Huh? What do you mean, not even the architect himself has no say?
What's the difference between an author, painter or composer and an architect, bricklaye
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This notion really needs more attention that it gets. Copyright law is a ruinous no-man's-land whose primary function is to denude the public domain of anything that some publisher might squeeze value out of, when it was intended to do quite the opposite.
Publishing companies want to turn culture into something we consume rather than participate in.
I'm not sure why, if I am not due a share of my grandfather's income as "royalties" for his farm or factory work, I am somehow due a share of royalties for a boo
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I don't follow you. First of all, privatizing profits while publicly insuring profits isn't socialism (socialism has its own problem). Second, copyright is primarily a tool by which corporations monopolize intellectual works in near perpetuity; that's essentially the same problem as the first one.
Salinger should have gotten 15-30 years of copyright, and afterwards his works should have fallen into the public domain and become an integral part of our culture. Instead, you still can't even get his works in e-
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I'm sorry, once he was dead all bets are off, despite what the ridiculous copyright laws say. Laws that lock up works for nearly a century after someone dies is a fucking joke. The people shouldn't have to wait 150 years for content to enter the public domain. If his heirs want money they can get up off their asses and get a job like everyone else.
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we wouldn't want to respect the wishes of an author so widely admired
What makes you think his wishes aren't being respected? Dead guy makes a lot of crazy rules just to read a few writings? Maybe he wanted us to break those rules.
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I'm right there with you. The original purpose of copyright in the U.S. (for *limited times* per the Copyright Clause) was to encourage people to create. You're allowed to profit from your work for a few years, which lets you eat and keep a roof over your head (and maybe put a coupl
that just takes the mystery back one step (Score:2)
How did this paper book's publishers get a copy of the story? They seem to have put out an unauthorized limited-edition run of 25 copies in 1999, but from what source?
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yeah that it's on a torrent isn't that much of a surprise if there's 25 copies + any number of photocopies going around..
it sounds like a gimmick though, the whole deal. how else to get a private fucking reading room for your book?
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how else to get a private fucking reading room for your book?
Write it on the inside of a bathroom stall door?
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it sounds like a gimmick though, the whole deal. how else to get a private fucking reading room for your book?
First, become a famous author.
Second, create a manuscript on paper
Third, donate that manuscript to a library, where they'll store it in a rare book room with all the other books that can't be replaced if lost or damaged.
Bye bye what.cd (Score:2)
Overrated (Score:5, Interesting)
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As a foreigner, I'd never heard of Salinger or Catcher in the Rye. When I first made it to the US, my friend gave me the book: "You HAVE to read that". I was underwhelmed and to this day still do not understand what all the fuss is about. A story about a whiney teenager with too much money for his own good ? This describe America pretty well to me !!!
It's not my favorite book either but I think if that's your take away from the book then you missed the point of it. It's a criticism of several facets of American society. Use google or wikipedia for better detailed literary analysis than I can do.
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Use google or wikipedia for better detailed literary analysis than I can do.
Screw that. You can actually hire someone to provide you with a customized literary analysis of the book. I believe they charge 75 dollars a page, more if there's a deadline. Some offer a guarantee of quality, but such things are always subjective.
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Re:Overrated (Score:5, Interesting)
Read some other novels from the 1950's and you will see how different it is from other books of the time. Yes compared to current novels it is somewhat underwhelming but compared to its contemporaries it is something completely new.
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And what if I don't like the whole genre? I am not saying that growing up is easy, but hundreds of pages of pointless self pity are not going to help, are they?
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Yeah, as an American, I've heard about it all my life. However...
> I was underwhelmed and to this day still do not understand what all the fuss is about.
Yeah, I think this is how most Americans who have actually attempted
to read the book feel about it. It's one of those works that gets by
on pure reputation: people don't want to publicly admit that they
didn't like it, because then they would not seem intellectual, because
everyone kn
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There, fixed that for you. And what's the latest on the Kardashians?
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I suppose you have to see it in its historical context. I read a British classic called Tess of the D'urbervilles at school. It was terrible, poorly written, full of clichés and ridiculous coincidences. The characters were thin and stereotypical, and the whole thing was contrived. Even so I could at least understand how it was interesting as a historical artefact.
But yeah, it was a terrible book.
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The Scarlet Letter isn't very much better, and lest I pick exclusively on American authors, I'll throw War and Peace into the mix as well, though I suppose maybe it's better in the original Russian
I've asked some Russian coworkers about War and Peace, and their opinion seemed to be that it was bourgeois crap; they much preferred Pushkin.
The Scarlet Letter is more of a literary 1800s version of a chick flick, so that's a lot of barriers to overcome for enjoyment.
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I've never read Of Mice and Men, but the story as portrayed in the movie was quite good in my opinion. I could see the writing being crap but to me the story is what is most important. Take the Lord of the Rings for example, I remember the language and style of the Fellowship in particular being awkward and simplistic. But the story and world it creates and relays is still amazing in my mind.
War and Peace though struck me as good writing but had a plot that was almost impenatrable. Because of the Russian us
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We need somebody famous but with no pretensions (someone like
a Letterman or a Foxworthy) to speak out in a voice that will be
heard and tell everyone the obvious: the emperor is butt nekkid.
Updike did just that in A Month of Sundays. Hilariously written, exposes the hypocracy and doublethink that is so rampant in American society, and in particular the right-wing clergy of this country, and very well written. People either love it or hate it ... the latter generally fall into the religious category, as the
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Umyeah, thanks for adding another category to my list of 'shit Slashdot pretends to know':
Literature.
More specifically, literary criticism. Especially criticism as dictated by someone that thinks Jeff Foxworthy lacks pretension or that his opinion on literary criticism matters, thinks that the bible is 'grossly underrated' (wrong both in estimating it's current impact and what it deserves) and used the term 'butt naked' (it's BUCK naked, FYI). Let me guess: you also don't like modern art.
Here's the list, F
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What if the aliens were the drug?
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No offense intended but I think its very possible as a foreigner you might not be able to really get it. Its like students today don't seem to get as excited about it as people who read it 20 years ago or more did. Catcher and more specifically Holden's experience everyone so identifies with have a lot to do with him facing the reality of life in mid century America in contrast to what he'd been told to except. That is why he is always up in arms about phonies. The less our nation looks like that less p
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"No offense intended but I think its very possible as a foreigner you might not be able to really get it. Its like students today don't seem to get as excited about it as people who read it 20 years ago or more did."
Books are a child of their time.
'Die Leiden des jungen Werther's' from Goethe doesn't bring any modern young people to jump from roofs anymore either.
But in its time it did.
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I am a foreigner too, and I read it in Russia soon after USSR fall, and I knew about this book years earlier, just could not obtain it.
After that, I read everything I could get by Salinger. Original book was stolen from me by fellow college mate, who was afraid he won't be able to obtain it otherwise (years later, we both laughed about it).
This book is fascinating, man. And if you do not understand why - do not worry. Some people never get what is so special about Van Gogh either, so you are not unique.
Pers
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No, I had to look it up too. Apparently it is about teenage rebellion and was published in 1951, at a time just before being a teenager was seen as something different that deserved a name for itself; as far as I remember, the term "teenager" is relatively new, and the idea that teenagers would reject the ideas of their parents was surprising, to say the least. On that background, perhaps it isn't surprising that it was a powerful book at the time, but I feel the subject is somewhat dated now. The "youth re
Re:Overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
As a foreigner, I'd never heard of Salinger or Catcher in the Rye. When I first made it to the US, my friend gave me the book: "You HAVE to read that". I was underwhelmed and to this day still do not understand what all the fuss is about. A story about a whiney teenager with too much money for his own good ? This describe America pretty well to me !!!
No way, god damn it. I think "The Catcher in the goddamn Rye" is one of the best goddamn books there is. Hell, I think it even won a few o' them fancy goddamn awards, but I can't remember their goddamn names.
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My only reaction was that he says "goddamn" two or three times per page.
Re:Overrated (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think Salinger's best, and most accessible, work is "Nine Stories". Have a go at that, if you are interested. How can you resist such titles as, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor" . . . ?
A story about a whiney teenager with too much money for his own good ?
A lot of famous literary works can be summed up in simple sentences:
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As a foreigner, I'd never heard of Salinger or Catcher in the Rye. When I first made it to the US, my friend gave me the book: "You HAVE to read that". I was underwhelmed and to this day still do not understand what all the fuss is about. A story about a whiney teenager with too much money for his own good ? This describe America pretty well to me !!!
Different strokes for different folks: as a non-american (and non-Brit) myself, I absolutely loved Catcher in the Rye when I first read it (which was in Croatian), and became instant fan of J. D. Salinger. After I graduated, I moved to a Nordic country and with more disposable income, bought all his published works in English - and devoured them!
*Different strokes for different folks, dude.*
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I've thought the same of many "classics". In fact, I stopped trying to read the classics that everyone says "I MUST read" because they always turned out shite. I stuck to the famous authors (Dickens, etc.), and the popular books, and was a hell of a lot happier.
Sorry, but even Shakespeare - it's a load of shite. It may have been ground-breaking in its day, but it's almost impossible to read in context nowadays and not that fulfilling even once you have. Why we still teach kids it, I have no idea.
The wor
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Re:Overrated (Score:5)
As a foreigner, I'd never heard of Salinger or Catcher in the Rye. When I first made it to the US, my friend gave me the book: "You HAVE to read that". I was underwhelmed and to this day still do not understand what all the fuss is about. A story about a whiney teenager with too much money for his own good ? This describe America pretty well to me !!!
The secret to Catcher in the Rye is reading it when you are a whiny teenager full of your own angst and immaturity and bursting with ego.
The message is:
1) You are not the only one
2) Don't do this
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I'll agree it might not deserve its place of regard near the apex of American literature but it certainly isn't crap. Maybe it no longer should be one of the five or six books we determinedly cram down every high schoolers throat anymore but someone seriously interested in American literature still needs to pay it a visit for certain.
It was a work of avaunt guard art in its day. There really was little in the way of "modern" coming of age works at the time, and nobody had done a novel length narrative in
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Just like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land today is a good read but not that special. But back in 1960 when it came out, holy fuck!
New depth to "RTFA" (Score:3)
Funny that I don't see anyone talk about the stories themselves, just the news surrounding their acquisition... Is there some radical content in these stories, something of super-human insight or intelligence, that was supposed to be locked away for a good reason?
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The stories suck (Score:2)
Really - they suck. As stand alone stories, they are worthless. If you actually know something about Salinger, and his life, then the stories might mean something.
First story: "I took my kid brother in to town for oysters, then we went to the beach, he swam for a bit, and he collapsed. Took him home, he died, end of story."
Unfortunately, my version is probably slightly more coherent than Salinger's version.
The other two stories aren't any better.
So where did the eBay copy come from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Incredibly, the uploader (or someone connected to the uploader) bought an unauthorized copy on eBay for a pittance
One presumes then that although this stuff is now kept under lock and key, it wasn't always so carefully protected?
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Or someone with a perfect photographic memory read it and reproduced it word for word. It could happen ... it COULD!
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Back in the days of Shakespeare, rival publishers used to print "scripts" of the plays based on what they could recall from having seen the plays. They were of course wildly inaccurate, with entirely different text.
It was a major reason for the First Folio. An official version to correct the record of what Shakespeare's texts actually were.
The mystery of how the story got out (Score:5, Funny)
Heavily-Armed Librarian Guardian: "What did you say?"
Slightly overweight visitor: "Uh, I said... looking classy... Looking classy, Mr. Salinger!"
Heavily-Armed Librarian Guardian: "Shh."
[ later that day ]
Heavily-Armed Librarian Guardian: "I wonder why that guy was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask."
Lovin' the 'Conspiracy Theory' synchronicity (Score:2)
In the movie Conspiracy Theory (1997) [imdb.com] Jetty Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is obsessed with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and does not know why (she swallowed the fly). His apartment is full of unread copies. It turns out that the spooks who monkeyed with his mind planted the suggestion to purchase copies of it because the relative unpopularity of the book made it an excellent way to track his movements electronically.
Today there is discussion on this thread of people who feel compelled to download these torrents,
This situation gives me hope (Score:2)
It proves people still read, and not just the tossoff-of-the-day about vampires. I've never read Catcher despite my English minor, but I'd be more apt to read these three stories not only because they're p1r4t3d but as silent testimony that people still value literature.
Unfortunately these are older stories (Score:2)
Years ago I had already found a document with uncollected Salinger stories (meaning, they were published in magazines, but never collected afterwards in book form). These were for the most part older work that in my opinion is not as elegantly crafted as his well known books and short stories. That document did also contain Hapworth 16, 1924 which was his last published story. I found it barely readable, strange as I have good memories of ma
But is it real? (Score:2)
US classics... (Score:2)
The Catcher in the Rye was ok, not an amazing "classic", but i got some enjoyment out of it.
To Kill a Mockingbird gave much more impact, a better "classic" of american literature and more coherent.
Catch-22, another much touted "classic" was completely bizarre, but strangely enough, I enjoyed more than the first two.
So all three are kind of US classics, but there again, Shakespear's books/sonnets are also classics, and, if I may be blunt, pretty crap compared to a lot of other literature out there.
Ill recomm