Nicole Flattery will be in conversation with Caroline Heafey about her award-winning short story collection Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury, 2019) and her upcoming novel Nothing Special (Bloomsbury, 2023).
A sense of otherworldly menace is at work in the fiction of Nicole Flattery, but the threats are all too familiar. Show Them a Good Time tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. And yet, the genius of Flattery’s characters is to blithely demolish the boundaries of these limited and limiting social types with immense complexity and caustic intelligence. Nicole Flattery's women are too ferociously mordant, too painfully funny to remain in their places.
Nothing Special is a whip-smart coming-of-age story that brings to life the experience of young girls in this iconic and turbulent American moment.
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother's sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.
Join us for an evening with Nicole Flattery as we celebrate Irish writing as part of New Irish Fiction: A Symposium, co-sponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Flattery’s work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Guardian, the White Review, and the London Review of Books. She is the winner of the An Post Irish Award, Kate O’Brien Award, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction, and The White Review Short Story Prize, among other accolades. A graduate of the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin, she lives in Galway, Ireland.