Episodes

Holden finally goes home... but he has to break in like a burglar to do it. Fake name, fake bad leg, holding his breath past his parents' door. When he finds Phoebe asleep in DB's oversized bed wearing blue pajamas with red e...

Holden closes out one of the longest nights of his life alone at a bar, drunk-dials Sally Hayes at 1 AM to ask if he can trim her Christmas tree, and ends up wandering Central Park in the freezing cold looking for the ducks. ...

Martha Hickson is a school librarian featured prominently in the PBS documentary "The Librarians." She's also a Banned Camp fan. On National Library Workers' Day, we talk with Martha about why book banners consistently target...

Holden heads to the Wicker Bar to meet Carl Luce, an older former student advisor from his Wooten days who knows a suspicious amount about everyone's private life. What follows is one long, uncomfortable bar conversation wher...

Holden kills time before a bar date by going to Radio City, where he watches the Rockettes, debates whether a roller-skating comedian is a little person, and sits through a movie so bad he recaps the entire plot just to prove...

Holden and Sally hit the ice at Rockefeller Center, where Sally rents a "little blue butttwitcher of a dress" and Holden discovers he's the worst skater on the rink. What starts as an awkward date turns into something much he...

Holden arrives early to meet Sally Hayes, watches girls in the lobby, and realizes he wants to marry her the second she walks in — even though he doesn't even like her. What follows is a date full of cab rides, bad theater, a...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 16.2 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden goes to Central Park looking for Phoebe, helps a little girl tighten her skate, walks all the way to the Museum of Natural History remembering every detail ...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 16.1 Holden walks through New York on a Sunday morning still haunted by the nuns, buys a record for his little sister that makes him happier than anything in sixteen chapters, finally calls the girl...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 15.2 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden finishes his conversation with the two nuns at the lunch counter, gives them ten dollars he can't really afford, discusses Romeo and Juliet with an English ...

Holden finally sleeps, checks out of the hotel (while avoiding the pimp who punched him), and calls the one girl he doesn't actually want to talk to instead of the one he does. Then he sits down at a lunch counter next to two...

Holden Caulfield starts this chapter talking to his dead brother Allie in an empty hotel room at dawn, and it only gets heavier from there. Maurice the elevator pimp and Sunny come back for the money Holden insists he doesn't...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 13.2 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast The prostitute finally shows up, and Holden Caulfield does the most Holden Caulfield thing possible: he asks if she wants to talk. She does not. What follows is on...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 13.1 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden Caulfield walks 41 blocks back to his hotel in the freezing cold calling himself a coward the entire way — all over a pair of gloves he never confronted any...

Holden Caulfield climbs into a late-night cab that smells like vomit and strikes up a conversation with his driver, Horwitz — who has very strong opinions about fish. Meanwhile, New York City feels lonesome and enormous, and ...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 11 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden can't sleep. He's sitting in a vomit-looking chair in the hotel lobby thinking about Jane Gallagher — the girl who lost eight golf balls that first afternoon ...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 10 Part 2 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden Caulfield dances with all three women from Seattle, buys them drinks he can't really afford, tricks one of them into thinking she just missed Gary Coop...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 10 Part 1 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden Caulfield can't sleep, so he does what any reasonable teenager would do — puts on a clean shirt and heads down to the hotel nightclub alone in the midd...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 9 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden Caulfield arrives in New York City in the middle of the night with cash in his pocket and absolutely no one to call. He stands in a phone booth for twenty minu...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 8 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden Caulfield hates phonies. He's been cataloguing them for seven chapters. So why does he spend an entire train ride lying through his teeth to make a stranger fe...

Holden can't sleep. He's lying in Ackley's stinky room, torturing himself thinking about Jane and Stradlater in that car. So he does the only logical thing—packs his bags, sells his typewriter for a fraction of what it's wort...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 6 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Stradlater comes back from his date with Jane and rejects Holden's composition about his dead brother's baseball mitt. What follows is a fight that leaves Holden bloo...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 5 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Holden writes a homework assignment about the one thing that matters most to him—his dead brother Allie's baseball mitt, covered in poems written in green ink. We lea...

The Catcher in the Rye Ch. 4.2 | Banned Books Comedy Podcast Stradlater's date is Jane Gallagher—Holden's childhood friend and crush. Holden nearly drops dead when he hears her name. He remembers everything about her: she pra...