Alfred A. Knopf, cloth, $24.95; Vintage Contemporaries, paper, $14.95.

Another satirical romp set in academia, Straight Man, by Richard Russo (Vintage Contemporaries, $13), follows the misadventures of a wisenheimer English professor at a third-rate college in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Fisketjon was a founder of Vintage Contemporaries, one of Random House Inc.'s trade paperback imprints, which published reprints of literary writers like Raymond Carver.

Bop, stories (Coffee House Press, 1986; Vintage Contemporaries, 1987)

With "The Sportswriter," published two years ago in paperback by Vintage Contemporaries, his work took a marked turn, catalyzing his remarkable leap to prominence.

Ms. Friedman's companion of 17 years, Jeff Stone, was in charge of the marketing of Vintage Contemporaries before starting a consulting company; he has advised HarperCollins on redesigning its imprints.

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is a postmodernist/absurdist book written by Mark Leyner, published by Vintage Contemporaries in 1990.

Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," the seminal novel of the 1980's, was first released as a paperback in 1984 by Vintage Contemporaries, a Random House imprint.

Most of the verse in All of Us: The Collected Poems, by Raymond Carver (Vintage Contemporaries, $14), was written in the 1980's, during the final decade of Carver's life, and reflects his desire to blur the lines between poetry and prose.

But it is his first novel, "Bodega Dreams" (Vintage Contemporaries), a cautionary fable about Spanish Harlem's gentrification with a doomed protagonist boldly patterned on Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, generating the buzz that augurs a famous future.