?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.
