"Overstuffed with bittersweet beauty." — Los Angeles Times
“A bittersweet love letter to 1990s New York….what’s best about Kois’ work here is…his eye for detail and penchant for humorously trenchant descriptions….This keenly observed…atmospheric first novel is an ode to friendship, creativity, and an era now gone.” — Kirkus Reviews
"A novel that is both an argument about art and a compelling example of it." — New York Times Book Review
“What a warm and delightful novel about friendship, responsibility, ambition, and legacy. Poignant without being treacly, Vintage Contemporaries is a time capsule of the recent past, and a wry and tender work of art.” — Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
"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, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
“Kois delivers a bravura first novel . . . . Kois' delectably smart, witty, caring, and radiating read channels an amusing and admirable woman’s evolving perspective and experiences.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Smart, sharp and with a twist of inside publishing, this novel is a gem.” — Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
“Kois skewers the myth of the “one right path” through life, while gently acknowledging our continued belief in it. A coming-of-age story built on unlikely friendships, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel of contradictions; it’s all there in the name.” — Elle
"It is joyful and comforting to read a novel with loving, complicated characters who aren't defeated by life—despite many reasons they could be." — Washington Post
"Lovers of used paperbacks and 1990s nostalgia will find a lot to like about this wholesome debut novel." — Associated Press
"Exceptionally warm-hearted . . . mounts a convincing case for such uncool causes as good taste over fashionable taste, editing as creative craft work, and smart novels where everything matters only as much as it ever matters in life." — Vox
"Charming." — Publishers Weekly
"Vintage Contemporaries is about many things—art, friendship, youth, desire, a very particular slice of New York City—but what makes this masterful debut sing is Dan Kois’s dazzling excavation of the human heart and all its contradictions, mystery, and beauty. Smart, laugh-out-loud funny and consistently surprising, this novel is a gem.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company
“Vintage Contemporaries is an elegant and tender exploration of friendship, the passage of time, and what we lose and gain in the process of becoming ourselves. Part elegiac, part mindful of what nostalgia can obscure about the past, Dan Kois’s novel provides precise insight into the defining moments of youth and adulthood, and finds grace and abundant possibility in both.” — Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections
"A delightful, funny novel that asks the question, Is writing about happiness an important thing to do?—while doing exactly that, so beautifully and convincingly that it’s like a magic trick.” — Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Do Not Become Alarmed
2022-11-16
A bittersweet love letter to 1990s New York.
Anyone who lived through the final decade of the last century in New York City will instantly recognize the world evoked by Kois, a longtime editor, in his debut novel. That goes double for young people raised in suburbs across the U.S. who moved to the city to work in publishing or the arts or for nonprofits. To be sure, that is a very specific readership slice. But those who fall into it may find themselves remembering—fondly or not, depending—their early 20s in a city that could be alienating, frightening, and diminishing but also intoxicatingly exciting. Kois focuses on the friendship between two young women, one a conscientious Midwesterner working in book publishing and subletting a sketchy apartment with a college friend, the other a free spirit who conceives of site-specific works around the city and lives in a squat. For unclear reasons, Kois has named both characters Emily. “If we were characters in a story,” one says to the other during an early encounter, “it would be pretty confusing that we were both named Emily.” Kois skirts confusion, to some degree, by identifying one Emily (the publishing one, who is the novel’s main character) as Em through much of the book. The somewhat nonlinear plot tracks Em’s maturation from a literary-agency assistant hanging out downtown in the early '90s to an established book editor raising a young daughter with her lawyer husband all the way uptown in the mid-2000s. Em’s rocky yet formative early friendship with Emily eventually peters out only to fire up again years later and again prompt change and growth. What’s best about Kois’ work here is not his novel’s low-stakes, episodic plot but rather his eye for detail and penchant for humorously trenchant descriptions: Em notes that Emily is wearing leather pants “that Em would never have been able to pull off, even if she could have pulled them on.” Such asides are amusing, but what does the Emilys’ story mean at a deeper level? It's hard to say, though this line, near the end, offers resonance: “Maybe we’re all frauds at twenty-five. But in our fraudulent selves we see the seeds of the artists we might become, if we can overcome our worst tendencies.” In the book’s final line, Em tells her daughter, “I’m always watching.” This keenly observed if imperfect book makes clear that Kois is, too.
This atmospheric first novel is an ode to friendship, creativity, and an era now gone.
