My Salinger year / Joanna Rakoff.
Publication details: London : Bloomsbury Circus, 2014.Edition: First editionDescription: 249 pages ; 22 cmISBN:- 9781408855508 (paperback)
- Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010
- Smith Rakoff, Joanna, 1972-
- Literature publishing -- United States -- History -- 21st century
- Authors, American -- 21st century -- Biography
- Literature publishing -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Literary agents -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography
- 818.54 23
- PS3618.A437 Z46 2014
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Biography | 818.54 RAK | Available | 057442 |
"This is a Borzoi book"--T.p. verso.
At 23, 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 Salinger's voluminous fan mail. Poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, this book 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.