Deschutes Public Library

My Salinger year, Joanna Rakoff

eng

no index present

non fiction

My Salinger year

Joanna Rakoff

"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"--, from publisher's web site

Part 1. Winter. Three days of snow ; Office equipment -- Part 2. Spring. The cover, the font, the binding ; The obscure bookcase ; The world wide web -- Part 3. Summer. The pitch ; Sentimental education ; Three days of rain -- Part 4. Fall -- Part 5. Winter again