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Vintage Contemporaries: A Novel
Vintage Contemporaries: A Novel
Vintage Contemporaries: A Novel
Ebook373 pages6 hours

Vintage Contemporaries: A Novel

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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.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJan 17, 2023
ISBN9780063162433
Author

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.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nice 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.

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Vintage Contemporaries - Dan Kois

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