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Joanna Rakoff

@joannarakoff

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My Salinger Year & A Fortunate Age
Books I love, writing, & a literary life
Margaret Qualley played me in the movie

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Craft books. Writing manuals. I’ve always struggled to get through even the most beloved of them. The books everyone endlessly quotes. Some made me feel I was doing everything wrong. Some simply didn’t appeal to me stylistically or in terms of tone and style, and so I found it hard to take seriously the guidance imparted. For a long time, I thought they just weren’t for me, at all. And then an editor assigned me @stephenking ‘s On Writing to review and, as I read, my jaw kept dropping open in recognition. And then another editor assigned me Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life, and same.

Anyway, these are some—about half—of the books to which I regularly return, which make me laugh and cry and want to race to my desk and fill up an entire legal pad, or that I can solve even the thorniest problems in my book or essay or novel, or that I can go deeper and deeper and deeper into my work.

Some of these, I’ve recommended to students and friends countless times. Others, I’ve sort of kept private, unsure of how to explain why they so move me, speak to me.

I know every writer—every artist?—has books like this and yours, perhaps (certainly), are different than mine (or maybe on the second installment of this list), and I’d honestly love to hear about them. Bestselling writer Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, at her desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard, working on her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, surrounded by drafts and books on writing, including Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing. taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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6 months ago

The best books of 2026, in the opinion of one memoirist/novelist (and recovering book critic).

Some of these are already huge, but I read before the hype set in, knowing nothing about them, so my response is purely based on my experience as a reader. And some, I know, are controversial—partially due to aforementioned hype—but I truly loved them and have followed the arguments and backlash with a slightly jaded eye, for I have seen these cycles over and over in my time as a writer (and editor), and have perhaps too many ideas about the impulse to take down a literary novel that finds a mainstream audience.

Some of these are not yet out but you can pre-order and the book will arrive a few months hence like a lovely gift from your past self!!

This batch of favorites contains a disproportionate number of debuts, I realized only when I put it together; and I realized that there’s a particular thrill and delight in reading a truly singular, groundbreaking first novel, in finding a new voice that speaks to your own, or shakes up your way of seeing the world, or makes you (me!) remember what it was like to write your first book, in hours stolen from your full-time job or your infant, the urgency that fueled you to stay awake past bedtime or wake at 4am while your household slept. These debuts all have that energy; they have something to say, about the world in which we live, and they say it not just in terms of plot and character but in their language and tone and style. They are exhilarating.

Okay, I already have another installment of 2026 favorites in the works, but please tell me if there’s anything I should read RIGHT NOW, that it would be criminal to leave out of number 3! ❤️ taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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5 months ago

Four years ago, last night. (I type, in pajamas, at the dog park…) ❤️🍾🎞️✨
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#berlinale2020 #berlinale #margaretqualley #sigourneyweaver #joannarakoff #mysalingeryear #redcarpet #redcarpetfashion #redcarpetdress #redcarpetready #jilsander #chanel @sarahmargaretqualley @ifcfilms @bloomsburypublishing @aaknopf taken in Cambridge, Massachusetts by @joannarakoff

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3 years ago

I see the same books mentioned over and over and over again here, both in terms of new releases and classics. And it’s honestly starting to drive a me a bit insane. There are so many truly brilliant, life-altering books—from this year and last, this decade and last, this CENTURY and last—that it feels like the no one is reading or discussing.

Does anyone else feel this way??

Here are just a few of my favorite novels, new and old, that I never see mentioned here. Some, like Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, won the National Book Award! Some, like Joshua Ferris’ And Then We Came to the End and Edward Docx’s The Calligrapher, were bestsellers and genuine sensations when they came out! And some never received the attention they deserved.

Maybe this fall is a good time to read a novel of which you’ve never heard? Or maybe it’s a good time to tell me about your favorite book that no one else seems to have read or the world seems to have forgotten?!

This month, by the way, I had to pack up all my books—thousands and thousands!—as our ancient house is being renovated (so it doesn’t, like, fall down). And as I packed, I kept setting aside books I love but never hear about anymore, and the pile is VERY HIGH! So this may be the first in a series. The set from the movie My Salinger Year, starring Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, showing a bookcase filled with old books, and the words Maddeningly Underrated Books. taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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5 days ago

My latest round of 2026 favorites!! Including some of the year’s Big Books and some that I’m not seeing mentioned here but are equally fantastic. (As always, despite being an insider, of sorts, I’m baffled by why some books crowd my feed and others don’t!)

This time around, I’m also including two novels I read months ago: Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon (perhaps my favorite book of the year, or any year??) and Caitlin Shetterly’s marvelous The Gulf of Lions. Both still flood my mind every day. I’m mentioning them again because I initially posted well before they hit bookstores (as I perhaps too often do!!) but now that you can actually buy/borrow them for yourselves!

This round of favorites is heavy on coming of age novels. Perhaps because The Catcher in the Rye has been on my mind even more than usual thanks to its 75th anniversary. Perhaps because that 75th anniversary has led to a flood of DMs about My Salinger Year, which has led me to think about my own coming of age—both the way I rendered it in that book and the way I lived it!—and it’s put me in a strange place, thinking through all the (bad!!!) choices I made, and paths I didn’t take, and the ways in which at a certain point, one has to accept that it’s too late, certain doors have closed. (I don’t mean that in a bleak way, truly.)

But maybe that’s why coming of age takes perennially appeal to persons of all ages! (Not just in literature, of course. Sterling Point, anyone?) Because they bring us back to that point of possibility, when anything could happen: You could fall in love with the person standing next to you on the subway! Be plucked for stardom at the grocery store! Discover you’re the heir to a remote Canadian island!!

Two of the novels on this list—Gabrielle Korn’s Long Island Girls and Sarvat Hasin’s Strange Girls—so perfectly capture both that moment and its aftermath, through the lens of class and female friendship, I sobbed my way through them, electric with recognition!

Anyway, what are your favorite 2026 books? Tell me! And, as always, if you’re annoyed by an egregious absence, take a look at my earlier installments!! xoxox, J Bestselling writer Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, the memoir on which the Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver movie is based, stands in front of Victorian wallpaper, in a rainbow-striped cashmere sweater. Text reads “my favorite books of 2026. Part 4.” taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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9 days ago

Twenty-five years ago, I turned on my pink 1980s television, found Rory Gilmore reading Dorothy Parker, and thought: Someone made a TV show about me?! Gilmore Girls has been my all-time favorite show ever since.

By now, you’re probably aware of the Rory Gilmore Reading List—a three-hundred-book compendium of every title mentioned, even in passing, on the show—and the associated Rory Reading Challenge, in which fans attempt to read the entire thing.

Not surprisingly, I love everything about this. But as an original Rory devotee—and someone who reads and writes for a living—I became interested in a slightly different list: the books Rory herself actually reads and discusses on the show. Which is still A LOT.

So, in honor of Gilmore Girls season, here is my personal Rory Gilmore Reading List: twelve books we either see Rory reading or hear her raving about that are also among my own most-loved books.

If you’re older than Rory, you’ve probably read many of them—but perhaps a long time ago? Might I suggest channeling your inner Rory, stepping off the hamster wheel of new releases, and picking up Mrs. Dalloway, The Outsiders, or Anna Karenina for a second time? Remembering what it felt like to be sixteen and encounter Franny Glass for the first time?

You won’t be sorry. Trust me: I keep returning to these books, just as I keep returning to Gilmore Girls, finding new things to love and admire each time.

But I’m curious: Have you actually read all or many of these? Have any of you actually done the Rory reading challenge? And which books would make your Rory Gilmore reading list? Still from Gilmore Girls showing Rory Gilmore holding a stack of books while talking on the phone. Yellow text reads: “My Rory Gilmore Reading List” and “12 books Rory actually reads on the show.” taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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23 days ago

My favorite campus novels, part 4!!

Every year, the first week of September is madness in Cambridge and Boston, as the tiny streets fill with U-Hauls and minivans unloading crate after crate of desk lamps and quilts and LED lights, nervous looking parents milling about on the sidewalks. I honestly love it. I’m always thinking about campus novels (because I’m writing one but also because I’m married to an MIT professor and living one?), but the students return makes me think about them even more.

This year, I’ve been thinking, specifically, about how much has changed since I was a freshman at Oberlin in, omfg, 1990. The ways in which the power imbalances—a polite way of talking about professor’s dating/sleeping with students—has so radically changed, for the better; but how many women of my generation bear the scars of our era (several novels in my previous campus novel posts have dealt with this, in a complex and brilliant way).

These novels, all by women, look at the ways mores have changed on campus and are still changing. They look at generational clashes and confusions. And at the internalized misogyny and racism that persists and prevails at so many institutions and in certain scholarly fields.

As always, I just want to make clear—for those finding me for the first time!—that this is part of a series! So if you’re wondering why a canonical campus novel isn’t on here, take a look at the first three installments! And part five is coming soon, and will be more tightly focused on classics of the genre, including some of my all-time favorite novels, of any genre! ❤️ Bestselling writer Joanna Rakoff author of My Salinger Year, the memoir that is the basis for the Margaret Qualley and Sigourney weaver movie of the same name, moving into her Oberlin dorm room in 1990 wearing a Depeche Mode t-shirt. Text reads: my favorite famous novels, part 4. taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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a month ago

What do our clothes, our homes, our marriages and our manners reveal about us when we are not paying attention?

Pulitzer Prize winner Alison Lurie made a career of noticing.

Brilliantly funny and unsparing about class, marriage, ambition, fashion, childhood and the complicated ways people behave, Lurie wrote novels and criticism that exposed the hidden rules of everyday life and what happens when we break them.

To celebrate her 100th birthday, acclaimed authors Bruce Handy, Joanna Rakoff and Micah Perks join Cody Upton of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to revisit the writer behind Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates, The Language of Clothes and more, and consider why her observations still feel startlingly current.

If you like your literary conversation smart, funny and just a little wicked, this one is for you.

Join us September 15 at The 92nd Street Y, New York. Tap the link in our bio for tickets.

#92ndstreety #AlisonLurie #Books taken in 92nd Street Y by @joannarakoff

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a month ago

Sometimes I feel like I have six different jobs: writer, mother, wife, public speaker, housekeeper, faculty wife. And also like I have separate wardrobes for each of those roles. I guess I don’t just FEEL that way: My cloaet divided into sections labeled: MIT Function, Bookstore Event, Gala, etc.. And also: Very Hot Weather, Work At Home, and Jumpsuit. Here are a sampling from those categories, from the past few months, with info about the garments in the captions if you’d like to a take a peek.

Sometimes, I go through phases in which one role dominates, like this past winter and spring, when I eschewed all speaking engagements and was mostly at home with kids or working. But this summer involved a ton of tracking back and forth, and also a ton of travel, which meant a lot of dressing up, and a lot of dressing for specific settings or functions. Even—and I know this sounds weird—that of mom: My natural inclination, as a person who wears clothing, is toward whimsy and fun. I dress to delight myself and to feel like myself. Which often means bold and noticeable patterns and colors, or vintage styles, or just anything—rainbow sweaters, fuschia mules-that makes me happy when I glance down at it. Over the years, it’s become clear that kids often don’t love their mom to stand out, but would rather she look like the other moms; and while this isn’t strictly possible for me, I try, as you’ll see.

These twenty dresses and outfits aren’t, of course, EVERYTHING I wore and loved, so say the word or drop a heart or something if you want to see the rest or at least some more.

I am a firm believer in the Fancy Lunch and so I used the occasion of my one-time student coming in from LA to get to Harvest, the ur-Cambridge restaurant.

This dress is a favorite of mine, from a designer I’ve been wearing since 2005, @lovebinetti , whose designs have classic, timeless lines and rich, saturated colors. If you saw me on tour for A Fortunate Age, you definitely saw me in a purple, velvet-trimmed Binetti I wish I still owned.

More than anything, this felt like a full-on mom summer, with all the kids home for a lot of it, and a lot of cooking, driving, talking through problems, deali Bestselling writer Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, basis for the Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver movie of the same name, at Dia Beacon, in a Christy Dawn dress, with a Marc Jacobs bag taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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2 months ago

Summer is supposed to be synonymous with fun, I know, but as it creeps on, I often find myself falling deeper and deeper into a state of sadness. Perhaps because, as my kids (and spouse) prepare for their new school year, I become acutely aware of the passing of time? Perhaps because I always think I’m going to accomplish more than any human could in those two warm months, and a sense of panic, or failure hits me? Perhaps I’m just bracing myself for the grind of the school year, the drop offs and pickups and lunches and homework (and this year, college applications), and the stressed out spouse?

Perhaps everyone, or many, feel this way? Not just me and Lana Del Rey? (Do you?) And the authors of these novels which, for me, capture that summertime sadness, even if they don’t entirely take place in the summer.

Please do tell me what else I should be reading to feel less alone as summer wanes. And if you’d like a part two of this, as I definitely have more, seeing as this has been a lifelong condition for me. (As a child, my parents always took me away for the final two weeks of the summer and kept me VERY busy, I think because they couldn’t bear being trapped at home with this suddenly sad child.)

I read Rachel Cusk’s first novel, Saving Agnes, as a grad student in London in the 1990s, when it was something of a sensation! Seeing as it was basically about a girl exactly like me in exactly my situation, I found it revelatory, if a bit overwritten (but I forgave it that! So was Thomas Pynchon’s first novel!!), and it’s one of the novels that led me to drop out of grad school and begin writing in a non-academic way.

If you’ve seen the My Salinger Film, you know there’s a scene in which Young Me has lunch with Rachel Cusk and I’m constantly asked if that scene really happened. It did not! In real life, I had a similar—if more scary—conversation over dinner with Mary Gaitskill, but she refused to allow us to portray her in the film. Two weeks before we went into production, the director asked me if we could fictionalize the scene, and swap in another writer I loved at the time. “Rachel Cusk,” I said, immediately. The producers—some of whom were British—loved this Bestselling author Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, the memoir on which the Margaret Qualley and Sigourney weaver film is based, sits in a chair in a Florence hotel room reading E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. Text reads Books that capture that end of August melancholy. taken in Washington D. C. by @joannarakoff

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2 months ago

My favorite books of 2026, part 3!! Featuring my most-anticipated book of the year, Min Jin Lee’s new novel, and several other Big Books, but also several incredible debuts (Patmeena Sabit!) and deeply original fictions that shook me out of my early summer reading slump!

This summer, my reading has slowed a bit, as I go deeper into my own new book, and also because, as happens sometimes, I started and put down a number of books that just weren’t for me, which led to a rare-for-me reading slump. So this third installment of 2026 favorites is a bit late but includes some of the most exciting and original novels I’ve read in years, which I know I’ll be thinking about, well, forever, and one—Julie Buntin’s Famous Men—that I’ve already dipped into a second time.

I may have delayed posting because one of the books on this list is somewhat divisive: Belle Burden’s Strangers. And, in fact, I avoided reading it for months because of the class-centered discourse about it, which led me to think it might not be for me. But I was wrong. I loved it. (More thoughts further in!)

I have a massive stack of 2026 galleys crowding out the cookbook shelf in my dining room—next to the even larger piles of campus novels and books on writing!—and also a list in Notes of already-out new titles I’m dying to read, but I’d really love to know your 2026 favorites so far. No matter how attuned I think I am to new releases, some always slip by me. (Many.)

And I’ve been receiving a lot of requests for specialized reading lists: books set in New England, thrillers, mysteries, romances, laugh out loud funny books, many for beach reads of all types. I’m putting these together, in my usual overthinking fashion, but please tell me if there’s anything you’d like to see. ❤️

If you know me, you know there are few novelists with whom I feel as deep a kinship as Min Jin Lee, whom I first discovered during the auction for A Fortunate Age, when several editors compared it to her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, in that both bear the influence of Victorian and Edwardian social realism, and both look at the invisible societal forces—economic, political, ideological—that shape every aspect of o Bestselling writer Joanna Rakoff, author of the memoir My Salinger Year, basis for the Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley movie, in a turquoise dress embroidered with hydrangeas, in her Cambridge, MA bedroom. Text says, My favorite books of 2026. Part 2. taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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2 months ago

Before I wrote a memoir about being a young woman working in publishing, I longed to read a novel or memoir or anything at all about a young woman working in publishing. There wasn’t much, at the time, but I devoured everything I could find, hoping to understand my own experience: the punishingly low salaries, the surge of excitement on discovering a brilliant writer in the slush pile, the camaraderie among assistants, all of it.

Lately, we’ve seen a spate of new novels and memoirs that beautifully, accurately portray this singular and fascinating industry, laying bare both the romance and glamour and glory, and the…less savory aspects, as well. Here are some of my favorites, new and old, which offer tremendous insight into how books are bought, sold, and made, from every angle, both in previous eras and our current one. All also happen to be delightful, cracking reads, and among my favorite books on any subject.

If you’re a publishing veteran, I think you’ll love these. If you’re knocking on the doors of Random House and FSG, as an author or a would-be editor or designer or anything, I think you’ll devour these both as entertainments and primers!

Every day, I get so, so many questions about publishing—via DM and in-person and in every other form of communication you can imagine—from people who’ve just finished My Salinger Year or just watched the movie or…just read *about* either and are thinking they’re perhaps manuals on how to get an agent or make it as a young writer in New York. I’m not posting this to say, “don’t ask me anymore! I have a new book to write! I’m tired of explaining what an auction is!”” But more to say, “read these, too!!!” ❤️

And please tell me what I’m missing here. Part two coming soon! Bestselling author Joanna Rakoff, writer of My Salinger Year, the memoir on which the Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver film is based, stands in a luxury hotel bathroom in a vintage Marni dress and Burberry trench coat. Text says, “I literally wrote the book on publishing. Here are the other books to read if you’re an aspiring author trying to understand the industry.” taken in Cambridge, MA by @joannarakoff

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3 months ago