About this item
Keenly observed and irresistibly funny, My Salinger Year is a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing.After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled officewhere Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunchesand then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salingers voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agencys form response and impulsively begins writing back.
About the Author
Joanna Smith Rakoff's novel, A Fortunate Age, was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, and a selection of Barnes and Noble's First look Book Club. Like the characters in that novel, she attended Oberlin College, and she holds degrees from University College, London, and Columbia University. She's written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, son, and daughter.
