My Salinger Year

Zusatztext 45750114 Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext Poignant! keenly observed! and irresistibly funny: a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties! a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing! where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. 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 a plush! wood-paneled office! where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches. At night she goes home to the tiny! threadbare Williamsburg apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty! surrounded by titanic personalities! and struggling to trust her own artistic instinct! Rakoff is tasked with 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. Over the course of the year! she finds her own voice by acting as Salinger's! on her own dangerous and liberating terms. Rakoff paints a vibrant portrait of a bright! hungry young woman navigating a heady and longed-for world! trying to square romantic aspirations with burgeoning self-awareness! the idea of a life with life itself. Charming and deeply moving! filled with electrifying glimpses of an American literary icon! My Salinger Year is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer. Above all! it is a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives and awaken our true selves. How many times had I been told that Salinger would not call, would never call, that I would have no contact with him? More than I could count.   And yet one morning, a Friday, at the beginning of April, I picked up the phone and heard someone shouting at me. “HELLO? HELLO?” Then something incomprehensible. “HELLO? HELLO?” More gibberish. Slowly, as in a dream, the gibberish resolved into language. “It’s Jerry,” the caller was shouting. Oh my God, I thought. It’s him . I began, slightly, to quiver with fear, not because I was talking to—or being shouted at by—the actual J. D. Salinger, but because I so feared doing something wrong and incurring my boss’s wrath. My mind began to sift through all the Salinger-related instructions that had been imparted to me, but they had more to do with keeping others away from him, less to do with the man himself. There was no risk of my asking him to read my stories or gushing about The Catcher in the Rye . I still hadn’t read it. “WHO IS THIS?” he asked, though it took me a few tries to understand. “It’s Joanna,” I told him, nine or ten times, yelling at the top of my lungs by the final three. “I’m the new assistant.”   “Well, nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he said, finally, in something akin to a normal voice. “I’m calling to speak to your boss.” I had assumed as much. Why had Pam put him through to me, rather than taking a message? My boss was out for the day, it being Friday, her reading day.   I conveyed this to him, or hoped that I did. “I can call her at home and have her call you back today. Or she can give you a call when she gets in on Monday.”   “M...

Product details

• Authors: Joanna Rakoff, Joanna Smith Rakoff
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.06.2014
• EAN: 9780307958006
• ISBN: 978-0-307-95800-6
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 243 mm x 30 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies