Tuesday, May 27, 2014

My Salinger Year - a charming memoir about a young woman assisting J.D. Salinger's literary agent in the 1990s

My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff 
Allen & Unwin  
To be published -  2 June 2014
Pages: 272
NZ$35.00 A$32.99

1996. Joanna Rakoff takes a job - her first - at one of New York's oldest literary agencies. On her first day, her boss - a commanding woman in her sixties who has been there for three decades - gives her a stern talk about someone named 'Jerry'. She is never to give out Jerry's address or phone number, or talk to reporters about Jerry, or to call him with questions. It is only then she notices an entire wall of books containing myriad editions of the works of J. D. Salinger. Oh, she thinks. That Jerry.

Filled with titanic personalities and legendary authors, including the mysterious and iconic J. D. Salinger, My Salinger Year is a vivid, funny and charming coming of age story about a young woman trying to find her feet, and her voice. It is also a love letter to the vanishing world of old-fashioned publishing.


This book will be especially enjoyed by authors, poets, and publishers and indeed all involved in the world of books.

About the author:Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers, was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Time Out, O:The Oprah Magazine and many other newspapers and magazines. 
Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University, University College, London and Oberlin College. 
Joanna Smith Rakoff lives in New York

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