In 2023 a man named Dan published a book about publishing. This book’s opening scene, set in the early 1990s and rendered in the careful style of much contemporary realism, introduces us to a publishing insider who occupies the center of a literary network—editors, writers, marketers, assistants—and whose personal story stands synecdochically for the wider story the book tells about the institution of publishing.
This book is Dan Kois’s novel Vintage Contemporaries. In the opening scene Emily Thiel, newly a New Yorker, meets another Emily: an artist living in a Manhattan squat trying to produce off-off-off-Broadway plays, who quickly redesignates her, the focalized Emily, as “Em.” From 1991 to 2007 Em, first an assistant at a tiny literary agency, becomes a moving-and-shaking editor at St. Martin’s Press. Obsessed with publishing, the novel lavishes particular attention on paperback originals, especially, indeed, Vintage Contemporaries, the paperback imprint founded by Gary Fisketjon...
