Vintage Contemporaries: A Novel
By Dan Kois
4/5
()
About this ebook
“Vintage Contemporaries is about being young and becoming less young, exploring friendship (sometimes magical, sometimes messy), parenthood (ditto), and how to reconcile youthful ambition and ideals with real life. It’s a warm and big-hearted coming of age story that made me wistful for my own twenties, set in a vividly rendered and long-vanished New York City.”—Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
Slate editor Dan Kois makes his fiction debut with this stunning coming-of-age novel set in New York City, about the joys of unexpected life-altering friendships, the power of finding ourselves in the moment, and the importance of forgiving ourselves when we inevitably mess everything up.
It’s 1991. Em moved to New York City for excitement and possibility, but the big city isn’t quite what she thought it would be. Working as a literary agent’s assistant, she’s down to her last nineteen dollars but has made two close friends: Emily, a firebrand theater director living in a Lower East Side squat, and Lucy, a middle-aged novelist and single mom. Em’s life revolves around these two wildly different women and their vividly disparate yet equally assured views of art and the world. But who is Em, and what does she want to become?
It's 2004. Em is now Emily, a successful book editor, happily married and barely coping with the challenges of a new baby. And suddenly Lucy and Emily return to her life: Her old friend Lucy's posthumous book needs a publisher, and her ex-friend Emily wants to rekindle their relationship. As they did once before, these two women—one dead, one very alive—force Emily to reckon with her decisions, her failures, and what kind of creative life she wants to lead.
A sharp, reflective, and funny story of a young woman coming into herself and struggling to find her place, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel about art, parenthood, loyalty, and fighting for a cause—the times we do the right thing, and the times we fail—set in New York City on both sides of the millennium.
Dan Kois
Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and two Writers Guild Awards. He’s the author of the novel Vintage Contemporaries; How to Be a Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), which was a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book; and Facing Future, a book of music criticism and biography. He is a frequent guest and host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, was a founding host of Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, and hosts The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis. He grew up in Milwaukee, where his first job was delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel, and now lives with his family in Virginia.
Related to Vintage Contemporaries
Related ebooks
Face of Greed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur American Friend: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Homesick Songs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fault Lines: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Private Means: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFour Treasures of the Sky: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Em's Awful Good Fortune: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beautiful Little Fools: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMika in Real Life: A Good Morning America Book Club PIck Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Best Intentions: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The East Indian: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Typecast: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Nemesis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Small World: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Showrunner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Holding Her Breath: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDecember Breeze Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristodora: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Girls in Queens: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHer Here Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Applicant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOne Woman Show: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Than You'll Ever Know: A Good Morning America Book Club Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Swank Hotel: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Popular Girl Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Run the Tides: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Frederick Sisters Are Living the Dream: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The View From Penthouse B Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Contemporary Women's For You
The House of Eve Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ugly Love: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unhoneymooners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heart Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5None of This Is True: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love and Other Words Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Then She Was Gone: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Lost Names Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The True Love Experiment Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Flight: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All Your Perfects: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The People We Keep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Women Talking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5November 9: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Fine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Missing Girls: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hopeless Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Family Upstairs: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Ends with Us: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret Book of Flora Lea: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Vintage Contemporaries
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nice title, I thought when I spotted this, and nice cover. Ha, fittingly then, the novel itself has to do with books: titles and covers also feature satisfyingly. When we begin, Emily is 22 and new to New York city by way of Wisconsin. She's a temp, scraping by and living in a ratty apartment with her gay friend Louis. Then she meets another girl whom she knows vaguely: another Emily, and this new Emily sweeps our girl off her feet, so to speak, and renames her Em.Thus begins the friendship that is the narrative spine. Weaving in and out of all this is Em's dream job as assistant to editorial agent named Edith. Emily has various temp jobs in support of her ultimate aim of being a director whose plays are site-specific: highly conceptual and performed in places like the Brooklyn Bridge and an abandoned hospital. Emily lives in a building called Sunrise Squat, so named because the residents have taken over this abandoned structure, reworked it themselves, and now manage it as a cooperative despite getting in frequent snarls with the law. Em slowly progresses in her job, managing the work of an author named Lucy Deming. The involvement of a book-cover designer here was so so NICE! (The title is taken from a real-life series published by Vintage.) I've slowly become interested in this subject, and been dying to read a book set in this world. I almost wish Em herself was a designer, but her work and the way she becomes a crack editor was exceptionally satisfying. Stucturally the novel has four sections by year: 1991, 2005, 1993, and 2007 in that order. We come to know that while Emily is magnetic, opinionated and passionate, and she and Em are soulmates when it comes to creative energy, there are problems in paradise. Our Em knows she's somewhat of a second-fiddle to the dazzle of her friend. When she finally stands up for herself, the friendship itself cracks. Boys feature but aren't investigated thoroughly; they, like siblings and parents, are adjunct characters to the novelist Lucy and the publishing world itself, and this I liked a lot.The story covers a major chunk of their adulthood in NY, and the city as usual is its larger-than-life self. There were a few sections that did drag a little, like all the pop-culture references and those bits about the baby but that just may be me. Also making an appearance are real-life publishing houses and apparently the book designer character is a real person who designed the real-life Vintage Contemporaries series. Cool, no?Dan Kois, you sly fox, where did you come from? Why is there not more hype about your own very fine novel? It's a mystery. Not surprisingly the author is a very booky type who also collaborated long ago on a blog discussing book covers, and of course I went there and rooted around it to my heart's content. I hope this (quite inadequate) review encourages others to pick this up. It's warm, intimate, not too clever, slightly sweet, immersive. Enjoy. I might even purchase it (I borrowed this time) just for that simple, evocative cover.