JAN 9 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Colette Shade, Vinson Cunningham, John Ganz, and Jeremy Gordon
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Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is a delightfully nostalgic and bitingly told exploration about how the early 2000s forever changed us and the world we live in.
THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.
In Y2K, one of our most brilliant young critics Colette Shade offers a darkly funny meditation on everything from the pop culture to the political economy of the period. By close reading Y2K artifacts like the Hummer H2, Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” body glitter, AOL chatrooms, Total Request Live, and early internet porn, Shade produces an affectionate yet searing critique of a decade that started with a boom and ended with a crash.
In one essay Colette unpacks how hearing Ludacris’s hit song “What’s Your Fantasy” shaped a generation’s sexual awakening; in another she interrogates how her eating disorder developed as rail-thin models from the collapsed USSR flooded the pages of Vogue; in another she reveals how the McMansion became an ominous symbol of the housing collapse.
Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is the first book to fully reckon with the mixed legacy of the Y2K Era—a perfectly timed collection that holds a startling mirror to our past, present, and future.
Colette Shade’s work has appeared in the New Republic, the Baffler, Interview Magazine, the Nation, and Gawker. Y2K is her first book.
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at the New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, the Awl, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Commonweal. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. A former White House staffer, he now teaches in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. His debut novel, Great Expectations, is out now with Hogarth Books.
John Ganz is the author of the New York Times-bestselling When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. He writes the Unpopular Front newsletter on Substack, and his work has appeared in the Washington Post, Harper’s, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.
Jeremy Gordon’s debut novel, See Friendship, will be released via Harper Perennial on March 4, 2025. He is a senior editor at the Atlantic, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Pitchfork, GQ, and the Outline.