Book List correction.

On your book list, the title Waiting for the Barbarians should be Diary of a Bad Year. My bad.

Also, below you will find more extensive descriptions of Franny and Zooey and The Zoo Story & The American Dream.

Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger. (200 fast pages, 5 nights)
Volume containing two interrelated stories by J.D. Salinger, published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger’s short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the “Jesus prayer” as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the “Jesus prayer” is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails. —from Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature .

The Zoo Story & The American Dream, Edward Albee. (128 pages, 4-5 nights)
The Zoo Story is Albee’s first play; written in 1958 and completed in just three weeks. The play explores themes of isolation, loneliness, social disparity and dehumanization in a commercial world. The American Dream is a satire on American family life. In the setting of a single day, a married couple and their grandmother are visited by two guests who turn their world upside down. —from Perspectives in American Literature: A Research and Reference Guide.

—Patrick.