Joanna Rakoff Archive
Courage and Craft in Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
The contributors to Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters’s new anthology risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it a collection that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, but also between wanting and voice.
Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year
What is it about being in your early twenties that makes the world seem so overwhelmingly crowded and yet so desperately lonely all at once? There’s something bewitching about it, too, and melancholy.
The Summer of Salinger, A Review
My Salinger Year Joanna Rakoff 272 pages Knopf $25.95 buy: here J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist Thomas Beller 192 Pages Icons Series, New Harvest $20 buy: here As a boy in Manhattan, Thomas Beller frequented the Museum of Natural History, struggled with his Jewish identity and didn’t apply
You’re So Vain, You Probably Think this Post is About You
A friend once asked if I’d based the guinea pig (mentioned, but offstage) in my first novel on his daughter’s imaginary friend (of whom I’d never heard tell). In his defense: they had the same, unusual name. In my defense: ?!@&?#*%? Maybe people want novels to be true. Maybe