My Salinger Year - Softcover

Joanna Rakoff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140885550X ISBN 13: 9781408855508

Publisher: Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2014

Synopsis

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, joanna rakoff moves to new york city and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for j d salinger she spends her days in the plush, wood-panelled agency, where dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches, and at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare brooklyn apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities and struggling to trust her own artistic sense, joanna is given the task of answering salingers voluminous fan mail but as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agencys decades-old form response instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of salingers devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, my salinger year is a memoir about literary new york in the late 1990s, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself swept into one of the last great stories and entangled with one of the last great figures of the century above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer and a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there existed a world in which writers used typewriters, publishers and agents sent manuscripts (on paper!) via the U.S. Postal Service, and starry-eyed ambitious young people moved to New York to try their luck in the literary world. (Okay, so that last bit still holds true.) It was the late ‘90s when writer-to-be Joanna Rakoff got her first job in New York publishing as an assistant to the woman who represented the great reclusive author J.D. Salinger. In the winsome and meticulously observed My Salinger Year, Rakoff recounts her experiences as an earlier-era Lena Dunham-creation, complete with a ratty Brooklyn apartment, strident anti-establishment boyfriend, and big, big dreams. “We all have to start somewhere,” is how Rakoff begins her story of being young, gifted, and possessed of a coveted “editorial assistant” job that her parents (my parents, your parents, everyone’s parents) would call “secretary.” While it’s true that J.D. “Jerry” Salinger figures into the narrative--and rather sympathetically so--it’s a mistake to say he’s at the heart of it. Youth, adventure, hope, ambition, and a keen eye and ear are what make this book run; with it, Rakoff--author of the novel A Fortunate Age--takes her place among such illustrious coming-of-age-in-New-York writers as Sylvia Plath, Candace Bushnell, and, well, maybe even J.D. Salinger. --Sara Nelson

About the Author:

Joanna Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Children's Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 140885550X
• ISBN 13: 9781408855508
• Binding: Paperback