In 1984 a group of young editors at Vintage Books

launched an innovative series called Vintage Contemporaries. The first lists

included such classics as Jay Mclnerney s Bright Lights, Big City; Raymond

Carver s Cathedral; and Ann Beattie s Love Always. In the years since, Vintage

Contemporaries has become the leading publisher of modern fiction, presenting

the best, the brightest, and the most original authors around.

Culled from the finest the series has to offer, here are stories ancJ excerpts

from some of our most accomplished and creative writers. This anthology

includes an excerpt from Frederick Exley s classic journey into the dark side of

the American dream, A Fan s Notes; three wonderful vignettes from The House

on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; Mark Leyner s uproariously funny and

inexhaustibly inventive account of an outrageously successful author named

Mark Leyner from Et Tu, Babe; Mona Simpson s moving and lyrical tale of a pre-

cocious girl s cross-country odyssey with her eccentric mother from Anywhere But

Here; a miraculous tale of a middle-aged divorced man at the crossroads of life

from Richard Ford s The Sportswriter; and many, many more.

The Vintage Contemporaries Reader is a treasure trove of some of the most

stunning writing in America today, showing not only what Vintage

Contemporaries has become over the last fourteen years but also what the state

of the art looks like on the eve of the twenty-first century.