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My Salinger Year

My Salinger Year 2

by Joanna Smith Rakoff and Joanna Rakoff
Publication Date: 05/06/2014
4/5 Rating 2 Reviews

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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 Salinger's 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 agency's decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger's 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.
ISBN:
9781408855508
9781408855508
Category:
Memoirs
Publication Date:
05-06-2014
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
272
Dimensions (mm):
216x135mm
Weight:
0.3kg

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2 Reviews

I found this book to be so much more affecting and Joanna to be more identifiable and warm than I anticipated. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't fiction.

This book will remind you of why books matter and how they can absorb you and take you to another world. Oh, and you will definitely want to pick up Salinger again once you've finished.

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Joanna's story of her year at a New York literary agency will appeal to all those who've sought refuge from the complexities of life in books. Lovely.

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