Reader Score
83%
83% of readers
recommend this book
A Penguin Classic
When Rona Jaffe's superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Sixty-five years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly--and sometimes hilariously--true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There's Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor's office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.
Rachel Syme is a staff writer for the New Yorker who has covered fashion, style, and other cultural subjects since 2012. Her cultural criticism and reported features--which focus primarily on the intersections of women's lives, artistic production, history, and fame--have also appeared in the Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, Grantland, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic, among other publications. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and now resides in Brooklyn.
"Jaffe... writes at the breakneck pace of a Sex and the City season finale and with the wry knowingness of a Nora Ephron novel...it's by turns enraging and poignant to read this book with post-#MeToo eyes, to appreciate how much women's lives have changed in the intervening decades and what's at stake when our hard-won rights to workplace equality and abortion care are threatened."
--Forward
"Lively, delightful and heartbreaking... The book is not tawdry; it's terrific...'The Best of Everything' seized the mood of the moment and told the truth, and women by the millions devoured it. Sixty-five years later, I did, too."
--Star Tribune
"An incredibly pleasurable and devastating novel -- do yourself a favor and get a copy."
--The Cut
"At no point in the story do [the characters] really 'make it, ' but in the meantime, they get as much from the world around them as they possibly can, trying to wrangle proposals or free steaks or promotions or raises out of the men who hold sway over their life. The intensity of their desire, their desperation, is riveting."
--The Atlantic
"Sixty years later, Jaffe's classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement."
--BuzzFeed