My Salinger Year

Author: Joanna Rakoff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
A keenly observed and irresistibly funny memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing. Now a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office—where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches—and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own.

A Fortunate Age

Author: Joanna Smith Rakoff
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141659633X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
Like The Group, Mary McCarthy's classic tale about coming of age in New York, Joanna Smith Rakoff 's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. There's Lil, a would-be scholar whose marriage to an egotistical writer initially brings the group back together (and ultimately drives it apart); Beth, who struggles to let go of her old beau Dave, a onetime piano prodigy trapped by his own insecurity; Emily, an actor perpetually on the verge of success -- and starvation -- who grapples with her jealousy of Tal, whose acting career has taken off. At the center of their orbit is wry, charismatic Sadie Peregrine, who coolly observes her friends' mistakes but can't quite manage to avoid making her own. As they begin their careers, marry, and have children, they must navigate the shifting dynamics of their friendships and of the world around them. Set against the backdrop of the vast economic and political changes of the era -- from the decadent age of dot-com millionaires to the sobering post-September 2001 landscape -- Smith Rakoff's deeply affecting characters and incisive social commentary are reminiscent of the great Victorian novels. This brilliant and ambitious debut captures a generation and heralds the arrival of a bold and important new writer.

At Home in the World

Author: Joyce Maynard
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1429977558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day With a New Preface When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship—at age eighteen—with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered. With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later—having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own—Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells—of the girl she was and the woman she became—is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

The Catcher in the Rye

Author: J. D. Salinger
Publisher: ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
The Catcher in the Rye," written by J.D. Salinger and published in 1951, is a classic American novel that explores the themes of adolescence, alienation, and identity through the eyes of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. The novel is set in the 1950s and follows Holden, a 16-year-old who has just been expelled from his prep school, Pencey Prep. Disillusioned with the world around him, Holden decides to leave Pencey early and spend a few days alone in New York City before returning home. Over the course of these days, Holden interacts with various people, including old friends, a former teacher, and strangers, all the while grappling with his feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction. Holden is deeply troubled by the "phoniness" of the adult world and is haunted by the death of his younger brother, Allie, which has left a lasting impact on him. He fantasizes about being "the catcher in the rye," a guardian who saves children from losing their innocence by catching them before they fall off a cliff into adulthooda. The novel ends with Holden in a mental institution, where he is being treated for a nervous breakdown. He expresses some hope for the future, indicating a possible path to recovery..

100 Days of Sunlight

Author: Abbie Emmons
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781733973328
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
When 16-year-old poetry blogger Tessa Dickinson is involved in a car accident and loses her eyesight for 100 days, she feels like her whole world has been turned upside-down. Terrified that her vision might never return, Tessa feels like she has nothing left to be happy about. But when her grandparents place an ad in the local newspaper looking for a typist to help Tessa continue writing and blogging, an unlikely answer knocks at their door: Weston Ludovico, a boy her age with bright eyes, an optimistic smile...and no legs. Knowing how angry and afraid Tessa is feeling, Weston thinks he can help her. But he has one condition -- no one can tell Tessa about his disability. And because she can't see him, she treats him with contempt: screaming at him to get out of her house and never come back. But for Weston, it's the most amazing feeling: to be treated like a normal person, not just a sob story. So he comes back. Again and again and again. Tessa spurns Weston's "obnoxious optimism", convinced that he has no idea what she's going through. But Weston knows exactly how she feels and reaches into her darkness to show her that there is more than one way to experience the world. As Tessa grows closer to Weston, she finds it harder and harder to imagine life without him -- and Weston can't imagine life without her. But he still hasn't told her the truth, and when Tessa's sight returns he'll have to make the hardest decision of his life: vanish from Tessa's world...or overcome his fear of being seen. 100 Days of Sunlight is a poignant and heartfelt novel by author Abbie Emmons. If you like sweet contemporary romance and strong family themes then you'll love this touching story of hope, healing, and getting back up when life knocks you down.

Dream Catcher

Author: Margaret A. Salinger
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439122024
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
In her highly anticipated memoir, Margaret A. Salinger writes about life with her famously reclusive father, J.D. Salinger—offering a rare look into the man and the myth, what it is like to be his daughter, and the effect of such a charismatic figure on the girls and women closest to him. With generosity and insight, Ms. Salinger has written a book that is eloquent, spellbinding, and wise, yet at the same time retains the intimacy of a novel. Her story chronicles an almost cultlike environment of extreme isolation and early neglect interwoven with times of laughter, joy, and dazzling beauty. Compassionately exploring the complex dynamics of family relationships, her story is one that seeks to come to terms with the dark parts of her life that, quite literally, nearly killed her, and to pass on a life-affirming heritage to her own child. The story of being a Salinger is unique; the story of being a daughter is universal. This book appeals to anyone, J.D. Salinger fan or no, who has ever had to struggle to sort out who she really is from whom her parents dreamed she might be.

Salinger

Author: David Shields
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476744858
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Book Description
"The official book of the acclaimed documentary film"--Jacket.

The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

Author: Ratika Kapur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408873664
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Renuka Sharma is a dutiful wife, mother, and daughter-in-law holding the fort in a modest rental in Delhi while her husband tries to rack up savings in Dubai. Working as a receptionist and committed to finding a place for her family in the New Indian Dream of air-conditioned malls and high paid jobs at multi-nationals, life is going as planned until the day she strikes up a conversation with an uncommonly self-possessed stranger at a Metro station. Because while Mrs Sharma may espouse traditional values, India is changing all around her, and it wouldn't be the end of the world if she came out of her shell a little, would it? With equal doses of humour and pathos, The Private Life of Mrs Sharma is a sharp-eyed examination of the clashing of tradition and modernity, from a dramatic new voice in Indian fiction.

The Fifth Passenger

Author: Joanna Rakoff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526600325
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description

J. D. Salinger

Author: Kenneth Slawenski
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604790
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspiration for the major motion picture Rebel in the Rye One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, the author of the classic Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now he is the subject of this definitive biography, which is filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records. Kenneth Slawenski explores Salinger’s privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation and rumor, revealing the brilliant, sarcastic, vulnerable son of a disapproving father and doting mother. Here too are accounts of Salinger’s first broken heart—after Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona, left him—and the devastating World War II service that haunted him forever. J. D. Salinger features this author’s dramatic encounters with luminaries from Ernest Hemingway to Elia Kazan, his office intrigues with famous New Yorker editors and writers, and the stunning triumph of The Catcher in the Rye, which would both make him world-famous and hasten his retreat into the hills of New Hampshire. J. D. Salinger is this unique author’s unforgettable story in full—one that no lover of literature can afford to miss. Praise for J. D. Salinger: A Life “Startling . . . insightful . . . [a] terrific literary biography.”—USA Today “It is unlikely that any author will do a better job than Mr. Slawenski capturing the glory of Salinger’s life.”—The Wall Street Journal “Slawenski fills in a great deal and connects the dots assiduously; it’s unlikely that any future writer will uncover much more about Salinger than he has done.”—Boston Sunday Globe “Offers perhaps the best chance we have to get behind the myth and find the man.”—Newsday “[Slawenski has] greatly fleshed out and pinned down an elusive story with precision and grace.”—Chicago Sun-Times “Earnest, sympathetic and perceptive . . . [Slawenski] does an evocative job of tracing the evolution of Salinger’s work and thinking.”—The New York Times