Vedanta manual among five new Salinger books

"The Catcher in the Rye" author Jerome David Salinger published his last story in 1965 but kept writing continuously until his death in 2010 and five of his new books, including a manual on Vedanta, are on the way, say his biographers.
"Based on private interviews conducted over nine years, we have learned that J D Salinger approved works for publication. We were able to obtain information about a number of those books and stories...These works will begin to be published in irregular instalments starting between 2015 and 2020," write David Shields and Shane Salerno in "Salinger".
Raised in Park Avenue privilege, Salinger sought out combat, surviving five bloody battles of World War II, and out of that crucible he created "The Catcher in the Rye", which journeyed deep into his own despair and redefined post-war America.

For more than 50 years, he has been one of the most elusive figures in American history. In the course of a nine-year investigation, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, Shields and Salerno have interviewed more than 200 people in their bid to solve the mystery of what happened to him.
Among the unpublished books is "The Family Glass", a collection of existing stories about the fictional Glass family along with five new tales.
The authors say that Salinger has also written a "manual" of Vedanta - with short stories, almost fables, woven into text; this is precisely the form of "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna", which Salinger called, in 1952, "the religious book of the century". He was an adherent of Sri Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism.

"Salinger's 'manual' is the explicit fulfilment of his stated desire to 'circulate', through his writing, the ideas of Vedanta. Further evidence of Salinger's devotion over more than half a century to Vedanta is that he donated a substantial and continuing portion of his estate to the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York and to other organisations that share similar religious beliefs," they write.

The third book is a novel - a World War II love story based on Salinger's complex relationship with his first wife Sylvia Welter. Then there is a novella that takes the form of a counter-intelligence agent's diary entries during World War II, culminating in the Holocaust. Finally there is a complete retooling of Salinger's unpublished 12-page 1942 story "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans".

According to the authors, Salinger continued to write but simply chose not to publish.
"Numerous eyewitnesses report that Salinger was writing every day, had a vault in which he stored completed manuscripts, and had a detailed, colour-coded filing system for the condition of each story," the biography, published by Simon and Schuster, says.