Vintage Contemporaries

A Novel

By: Dan Kois

Narrated by: Eileen Stevens

Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

“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.

©2023 Dan Kois (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

Loved it!

The story was so relatable- friends, marriage, children, career. I loved the characters especially Em and her thoughts about being a mother and wife. Well Done!

Kind of Trite and Boring

Characters were not fully developed so did not grab the attention of this listener. Time goes on and folks respond to the times and maybe learn the obvious. Not a very exciting or challenging book.

Worth a Listen

I enjoyed the story for the most part but agree with others that the characters weren't that well developed. The affected artsy Emily was annoying and I couldn't understand why she would initially approach the semi-normal Emily. While the latter's realization as to why affected Emily hung out with her was insightful and believable, the meeting and artsy girl's pursuit of Emily seemed a bit unbelievable. The secondary storyline would have made a better focus, rather than the Emily friendship, had it been more thoroughly fleshed out. The older character's story was more interesting than artsy Emily's antics. I didn't care for the narrator's presentation of the story but I think this is just a personal thing. The narrator wasn't annoying and did a decent job, it was just that she sounded bored by the book!!

Plodding, disjointed, and all the characters fell

The synopsis of this book sounded great, so promising. I feel like if the author actually wrote about that, it may have been an interesting book. But instead it was plodding, disjointed, and all the characters fell flat. Lucy seemed like the most interesting character, but she wasn't fully formed. The two Emily's were dreadful. Also, despite the nod in the book about not naming characters with the same name, it wasn't cute, it was annoying. The secondary Emily was just unlikeable and I couldn't see why Em would even be friends with her so long, or why their not being friends was a big deal. The author hinted at a big event that shattered their friendship, but even that wasn't interesting. (or an event)
I lived this time in the book, the 1990s in the city. This book did little to capture that time or make me feel like I was back there. Perhaps this is why men shouldn't write female lead characters in a story like this, because the was little to like about any of them. I listened to the audio version of this book, and found myself drifting and not paying attention. I wanted to abandon it much sooner, but was hoping it would get better. It did not.