. As it happens, this girl got to talk to J.D. . Joanna Smith Rakoff’s My Salinger Year is ostensibly about finding your way as a young adult and what it really means to be on your own for the first time; but it’s really about Manhattan at the brink of the internet age, the disappointments of love, the joys of reading, the perils of ambition, phonies (of course it’s about phonies! Even better, at the time Rakoff had never read any Salinger at all, so you get to see him through fresh eyes. This might seem like a fairly obvious fact given that the blurb clearly says it's a memoir, but somehow, until I read the author's introduction, I remained convinced that it was at least partly a fictionalised version of reality. . It was the late ‘90s when writer-to-be Joanna Rakoff got her first job in New York publishing as an assistant to the woman who represented the great reclusive author J.D. Salinger was brutal. is just a voice at the other end of the phone (he does, though, make one single appearance) but the book is about much more than just that: life, being young, broke, shy, bright, being in new York in a special place at that special time when nothing is making sense yet but everything is. The tie to Salinger seemed somewhat thin and stretched, and while that is not why I read the book, it seems as though it's use as the narrative arc was forced. By clicking SIGN UP, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House’s, Editor's Picks: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Stories Read By Your Favorite Celebrities, Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs, Discover Book Picks from the CEO of Penguin Random House US. Loved it. "Salinger was brutal. Putnam’s Sons. One of her friends describes the work place quite succinctly as follows: Joanna Rakoff's novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, and was a New York Times Editors' Choice, an Elle and Booklist Best Book of 2009, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller. And her office environment is fascinating (smoking! A remembrance of personal encounters with a man who had those with precious few people. . 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. Her book, on which the film of the same name is based and which opened the Berlin Film Festival, came out of her experience of being that girl who comes to New York. The most powerful and original parts of the book describe the intimate relationships Rakoff establishes with the readers through their letters and explore her theory that ultimately writing is … This memoir became Rakoff's second book, entitled My Salinger Year it was published in 2014 to broad critical acclaim. . Probably because I expected something different, something less 'Sex in the City at a literay agency'. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there existed a world in which writers used typewriters, publishers and agents sent manuscripts (on paper!) Download My Salinger Year Book PDF. So when I spotted this book and sensed an opportunity to learn more about the famously reclusive author it was a no-brainer for me, I had to read it. I loved the writing style Joanna Rakoff used to share a year in her life working as an assistant at a literary agency in New York. I listened to the book as an audiobook; the narrator was the author; she did a really good job. So why does My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff's new memoir – not even fiction, and, most improbably of all, set in 1996 – feel so akin to those earlier books? The special unworldliness of the young literary person, who has reached adulthood without ever knowing or caring much about how the world works, is the real subject of My Salinger Year.” —Tablet Magazine  “Gripping and funny. Salinger was such a phenomenon…”because the experience of reading a Salinger story is less than reading a short story and more like having Salinger himself whisper his accounts into your year.”. Motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley of this book so true. ” —The Sydney morning Herald “ you..., $ 25.95 ( 272p ) ISBN 978-0-307-95800-6 description of Rakoff 's my Salinger Year as. ) Joanna Rakoff 's account of her First job in a New York City firm she calls the... Year made me understand – all over again – why J.D she shares her. 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