“See more glass...Did you see more glass?” asks the little girl in ‘A Perfect day for a Bananafish’ before she meets Seymour Glass and goes swimming with the neurotic soldier, who afterwards returns to his room, takes out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic and shoots himself in the head. J.D. Salinger’s collection of short stories, For Esmé- with Love and Squalor is funny like this. The brilliance of Salinger’s American skaz-slang dialect traces the quiet hysteria of the 1950s through tender exchanges between emotionally frenzied adults and children, who possess an amusing mix of vulnerability and bold inquisitiveness.

It’s Salinger’s sensitive ear for dialogue which makes these stories exceptional, especially when most often its children’s voices he chooses to impersonate. Penetrating the world around them with intelligence and deadpan wit, its hard to resist such characters. A child’s close inspection of detail also infuses through the narrative voice, tracking tiny movements like the eating of a chicken sandwich with cinematic precision. You realise where Wes Anderson has been getting his inspiration from for all these years.

It seems if you haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye by the time you are sixteen, the Salinger moment passes you by and all that’s left is to sniff at such American teen histrionics and forget that Salinger wrote anything else. But his short stories, nine in total here (and who knows how many more will be discovered posthumously-Salinger’s daughter has hinted there are 15 unpublished manuscripts) are concentrated instances of Salinger’s delicate craft and should now be read and re-read, if only for interactions as fantastically endearing as this (a little girl is ordered to describe her imaginary friend): “He has green eyes and black hair.” “What else?” “No mommy and no daddy” “What else?” “No freckles” “What else?” “A sword” “What else?” “I don’t know.”