Ten Favorite Early Vintage Contemporaries Releases
(In my first year of college, Random House’s Vintage imprint—which now publishes my own paperbacks—was an essential reading gateway for me. I began exploring contemporary American literary fiction when a friend of mine gave me Scott Bradfield’s The History of Luminous Motion as a Christmas present, describing it as his favorite novel, and began exploring contemporary international literary fiction not long after, when I bought Peter Carey’s collection The Fat Man in History on a whim from my neighborhood bookstore. Within weeks I was searching bookstore shelves for the immediately identifiable spines of the Vintage Contemporaries line, which published almost exclusively American authors, and the Vintage International line, which was more cosmopolitan. Some of the authors I discovered this way are still among my favorites. From September of 1984, when the Vintage Contemporaries imprint was launched, until roughly 1990, when the designs started to vary, the books in the series all looked like this. Here are my ten favorite releases from that period, listed alphabetically by author.)
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield
First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Coast of Chicago: Stories by Stuart Dybek
Rock Springs: Stories by Richard Ford
The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington
Angels by Denis Johnson
The All-Girl Football Team: Stories by Lewis Nordan
Escapes: Stories by Joy Williams
— January 18, 2021