Vintage Contemporaries

November 1, 2022
Slate editor and writer, podcaster, and author of How to Be a Family (2019), Kois delivers a bravura first novel narrated by sensitive, funny wannabe-writer Emily from Wisconsin, tentatively seeking her way in 1990s New York City. Abruptly reduced to Em when she is pulled into the force field of a far brasher Emily who is determined to become a radical stage director, Em works for an eccentric, old-school literary agent and gets involved in fair-housing protests organized by activist-squatters occupying the building Emily lives in. Em's publishing future grows brighter thanks to a college friend of her mother's, a writer who insists on creating cheerful books even as her own life grows dark. As Kois tracks the two Emilys as they become their full selves, he rings social alarms of sexism, racism, and homophobia while offering cutting and affectionate commentary on the publishing industry and sweet praise for family life. Sharing the vibe of Emma Straub and Jean Thompson, Kois' delectably smart, witty, caring, and radiating read channels an amusing and admirable woman's evolving perspective and experiences.

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November 28, 2022
Kois’s charming if schematic latest (after the memoir How to Be a Family) charts the lives of two off-and-on-again friends from the early 1990s through the mid-aughts. In 1991, Emily, a Midwestern transplant newly entering the literary world as an agent’s assistant, meets another Emily, a hard-partying playwright living in an East Village squat. Punk Emily turns publishing Emily into Em, reasoning that “if we were characters in a story... it would be pretty confusing that we were both named Emily.” More than a decade later, Em—going by Emily again—is a senior editor and a new mother. It’s been eight years since she last saw punk Emily, the latter’s addiction having caused a rupture in their friendship. Punk Emily is sober now, and when publishing Emily wanders into the bar where she works, she hopes they can reconcile. Kois meanders through roughly sketched plot points—the lukewarm comeuppance of Emily’s boss for his indelicate behavior toward the women at the office; a memorial protest at the old squat, now another expensive New York apartment building; the change in pace of life with a two-year-old, rather than a newborn—and resolves the substantial conflict that arises between the Emilys too quickly. With its sharp edges filed into a too-perfect smile, this one lacks bite.

December 1, 2022
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.

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