The 32-year-old Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting has admitted to writing a book that revisits the classic protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye” as an elderly man. Writing with the pseudonym John David California, Colting, his publisher, and his distributor were all recently sued by J.D. Salinger.
The Smoking Gun reports–as GalleyCat discovered earlier–that Colting’s Nicotext imprint publishes a variety of odd joke titles like “The Macho Man’s (Bad) Joke Book.” Salinger seeks to block the publication of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye” and seeks undisclosed damages. The distributor vowed to fight back in court next Monday.
Here’s more from the TSR report: “Colting told TSG that, along with a partner, he has produced a variety of humor or ‘quirk’ titles, but that ’60 Years Later’ was his “first published novel” … A purported photo of “California” appeared last month in England’s Daily Telegraph, but the picture was actually of actor Gustav Roth, a friend of Colting. ‘It was a bit tricky of us but we did it without any bad intentions,’ Colting wrote in an e-mail. ‘I mean, the whole point of a pseudonym is it being a secret.'”