Email Author Joy Press

2002 Stories by Joy Press

• The Dreamlife of Shoppers

  published December 24, 2002

  As you drift through the aisles at Bloomingdale's, do you ever stop to think what you're doing there? Brushing against strangers' coats, lost in... More >>

• Fan Fare

  published December 3, 2002

  All my life I've been surrounded by collectors: my grandmother, who energetically collated coupons, filing away bargains she'd never have time to... More >>

• Unthanksgiving

  published November 26, 2002

  Almost 50 years ago, a Scottish art school student named Alasdair Gray convinced his father to let him spend the summer writing fiction instead of... More >>

• Mother Jones's Diary

  published November 19, 2002

  If you haven't heard of I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother, then you probably don't have kids. I do, or... More >>

• Vice Bust

  published November 12, 2002

  Vice seemed to appear out of nowhere. Floating into downtown Manhattan record and clothing boutiques in the late '90s, the freebie... More >>

• The High Cost of Loving

  published November 5, 2002

  Genius doesn't look so geeky these days, what with Nobel-winning economist John Nash immortalized as a stone fox on the big screen and physicist... More >>

• Eggers on His Face

  published October 22, 2002

  Let's try an experiment. Pretend you know nothing about Dave Eggers. You've never read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, never set... More >>

• Logo Rhythms

  published October 15, 2002

  Naomi Klein is sitting in a dim stairwell, looking dazed. She's just emerged from a fierce More >>

• Obsessive Eye

  published September 24, 2002

  "An anonymous observer under the cover of summer, she spent her days sitting downwind, listening to their conversations. They talked about... More >>

• Hemon Can't Wait

  published September 17, 2002

  Aleksandar Hemon has the kind of backstory legends are made of: Boy grows up in Bosnia, becomes journalist, travels to U.S. on government goodwill... More >>

• A Toy Story

  published August 27, 2002

  In this age of automation and simulacra, we take it for granted that dolls cry and pee and beg to be fed, that Disneyfied animatronic bears usher... More >>

• Bound to Java's Huts

  published August 20, 2002

  The Girl From the Coast starts the way many fairy tales end: with a wedding. But this is a dark fairy tale riddled with the horrors of real... More >>

• Bohemian Dreams

  published August 13, 2002

  Ross Wetzsteon, an editor and mensch for more than three decades at the Voice, died in 1998 while in the midst of writing Republic of... More >>

• The Medieval Mob Squad

  published August 6, 2002

  Nick Tosches is your classic anti-intellectual intellectual: Like his rockcrit comrades Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, he's a learned man who... More >>

• Palace in Wonderland

  published July 23, 2002

  I like to think of Kathryn Davis as the love child of Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll, with a splash of Nabokov, Brontë, and Angela Carter... More >>

• The Fuckup

  published July 9, 2002

  I can't remember when poking fun at Toby Young became a spectator sport in the Manhattan media. He once had an impressive reputation as the... More >>

• Heaven Can't Wait

  published June 18, 2002

  Her voice hits you like a bracing blast of girl air: precocious, impatient, plucky, and utterly adolescent. Susie used to snap covert photos of... More >>

• Privileged Information

  published June 11, 2002

  Dirk Wittenborn is convinced that people transform into assholes when they grow up. "I've gone to three therapists over the years. The first was... More >>

• The Lady Is a Tramp

  published May 28, 2002

  I first learned about sex from a French woman. Reading Colette as a rosy-cheeked 14-year-old, I was awestruck by the perfumed intrigue of her... More >>

• Living in Oblivion

  published May 21, 2002

  American society thrives on flux. Relocating to a new town, adopting an alternate identity on the Internet, even swapping one's gender are within... More >>

• Frida Icon

  published May 14, 2002

  Every era chooses its own heroes, and Frida Kahlo was the perfect feminist heroine for the '80s. Hayden Herrera's Frida, the first... More >>

• The Me Machine

  published May 7, 2002

  When I was a kid, I experienced a running commentary in my head, as if there were a tiny narrator presenting a blow-by-blow on my life. Walking to... More >>

• Dada's Mama

  published April 23, 2002

  Baroness Elsa makes Vanessa Beecroft's chorus line of vaginas and Karen Finley's canned-yam act look downright dull. She showed up at the bitter... More >>

• Land of Hype and Glory

  published April 16, 2002

  Remember Cool Britannia? Rebranding the U.K. as the home of hip, this was Tony Blair's attempt at a national makeover. No more Ye Olde England,... More >>

• Oh Calcutta!

  published March 26, 2002

  After decades of indifference, the West suddenly developed a craving for Indian fiction in 1997—as if you could consume a culture the way you... More >>