My Salinger Year

Product Description

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City & 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 & typewriters still reign & old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches, & at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Brooklyn apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour & poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities & 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 & begins writing back... Poignant, keenly observed & 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 & entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. Above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer & a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives.