Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley was publicising other people's books at Vintage when her own first collection, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, appeared in 2008 and made her a Thurber Prize finalist; Look Alive Out There earned a second nomination ten years later. Cult Classic, published in 2022, is her second novel. Lola keeps meeting former boyfriends around Chinatown, one after another, until she learns that her old editor-in-chief at a magazine called Modern Psychology has remade himself as a self-help figure and set up a secret outfit, the Golconda, named for a Magritte painting, whose business is manufacturing exactly those encounters. Reviewers read it as a romantic comedy crossed with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Crosley, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, followed it with Grief Is for People in 2024, a memoir that ties a burglary at her apartment to the death of her friend and former colleague Russell Perreault.