About this episode

Joanna Rakoff discusses her experiences working at a literary agency and her interactions with J.D. Salinger.

‘There was no voicemail. I was the voicemail.’ In this out-of-series special episode of the Slightly Foxed podcast Joanna Rakoff, author of the 2008 literary smash hit My Salinger Year (released as a Slightly Foxed limited-edition hardback in March 2024), joins us down the line from her home in Massachusetts for a conversation with our podcast presenter Rosie Goldsmith. From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Rosie and Joanna take a trip back to New York in the freezing winter of 1996 when Joanna Rakoff, aged 24, landed her first job as assistant at one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished literary agencies. No matter that she didn’t even know what a literary agent was and had lied about her typing speed. She’d also led her parents to believe she was living with a female college friend when she was in fact sharing an unheated Brooklyn apartment with a penniless and unpublished Marxist novelist whose sole and very part-time job was watering the plants at Goldman Sachs. Rosie and Joanna take us deep into the strange, time-warped world she’s strayed into at The Agency, with its Selectric typewriters, filing cabinets and carbon paper, and into her unusual relationship…

People in this episode

Host: Rosie Goldsmith

Guest: Joanna Rakoff

Topics covered

• literary agencies
• J.D. Salinger
• New York in the 1990s
• memoir
• writing
• publishing

Keywords

• Joanna Rakoff
• Rosie Goldsmith
• J.D. Salinger
• literary agency
• My Salinger Year
• 1996
• Brooklyn
• memoir

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Agency

Books & works: My Salinger Year

Places: New York, Massachusetts, Brooklyn

More episodes of Slightly Foxed

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• 54: The Many Lives of Muriel Spark · July 15, 2025 · 58 min
• 53: Dervla Murphy: A Life at Full Tilt · April 15, 2025 · 59 min
• 52: William Golding: A Literary Colossus · January 15, 2025 · 59 min

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