Joanna rakoff the fifth passenger

Joanna Rakoff

Goodreads Author


Born

Suffern, NY, The United States

Website

http://joannarakoff.com


Twitter

jrakoff


Genre

Literature & Fiction, Memoir


Member Since

March 2012


edit data


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.

Her memoir, My Salinger Year, is a semifinalist in the 2014 GoodReads Choice Awards! You can vote for it here!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.

Her memoir, My Salinger Year, is a semifinalist in the 2014 GoodReads Choice Awards! You can vote for it here!...more






By Victoria Best

My Salinger Year was unquestionably one of the best books I’ve read this year – poignant, funny, real, warm – you can read my review here. The author, Joanna Rakoff, managed to find time in her hectic schedule to answer my (many!) questions with tremendous grace and generous detail:

Victoria: I understand that there’s quite a complicated story about the genesis of My Salinger Year? I’d love to hear more about how the book came into being.

Joanna: Agh, well, where to start? Perhaps a dozen years ago, maybe more, I was trying to make my way as a freelance writer. This was, perhaps, the last moment when a person could, just barely, scrape together a living reviewing books, if one could file a superhuman number of reviews per week, but I reached a point at which I was having some trouble. My income was too sporadic. I was having trouble making ends meet between checks. I knew I needed to move to the next level, to start writing longer pieces for better magazines—or something like that—but I couldn’t quite break through. In desperati

Joanna Rakoff

American memoirist and novelist (b. 1972)

Joanna Rakoff (born May 8, 1972) is an American novelist and memoirist.

Early life

Rakoff was born in Nyack, New York, in 1972.[1]

Education

Between 1990 and 1994, Rakoff studied English literature at Oberlin College in Ohio. Between 1994 and 1995, she completed an MA in English literature at UCL in London.[1] In 1996 and 1997, she did a year of Ph.D. coursework in English literature at CUNY Graduate Center, before dropping out to study writing at Columbia University, where she completed her MFA in 1998.[1]

Life and career

In 1996, aged 23, Rakoff took a job at one of New York’s oldest literary agencies, Harold Ober Associates. Unbeknownst to Rakoff, the agency looked after the interests of the notoriously reclusive writer J. D. Salinger. In her time at the agency Rakoff's responsibilities included responding to the large volume of fan mail that Salinger received. Rakoff was instructed to respond with a generic response that explained that Salinger did not rea

Copyright ©popfray.pages.dev 2025