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Show Them a Good Time
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Description
"Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends
Named A Most Anticipated Novel of 2020 by
Entertainment Weekly * Marie Claire * Wall Street Journal * The A.V. Club * The Millions * Time * Parade * The Chicago Review of Books * LitHub
A blisteringly original and wickedly funny collection of stories about the strange worlds that women inhabit and the parts that they must play.
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.
In this fiercely original and blazingly brilliant debut, Flattery likewise deconstructs the conventions of genre to serve up strange realities: In Not the End Yet, Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in Sweet Talk, the mysterious disappearance of a number of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in this collection's center piece, Abortion, A Love Story, two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive, alarming, and wickedly funny play that takes over their own offstage lives. And yet, however surreal or richly imagined the setting, Flattery always shows us these strange worlds from startlingly unexpected angles, through an unforgettable cast of brutally honest, darkly hilarious women and girls.
Like the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, and Ottessa Moshfegh, SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME is the work of a profoundly resonant and revelatory literary voice – at once spiky, humane, achingly hilarious-- that is sure to echo through the literary culture for decades to come.
Product details
| Published | Jan 28 2020 |
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| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781635574296 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Circus |
| Dimensions | 8 x 6 inches |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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I truly love and admire Nicole Flattery's writing. Show Them a Good Time is a masterclass in the short story – bold, irreverent and agonisingly funny – and it does full justice to its author's immense talent
Sally Rooney
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Exhilarating. Flattery's judgments crackle with cruel, clear sight ... Flattery writes with empathy, freedom and virtuosic technique: this debut announces the arrival of a brilliant talent
Financial Times
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If tradition is the kitchen sink, Flattery removes it from the wall, smashes it to pieces, and dances all over it with delight. With a literary voice that is as sophisticated and erudite as it is spiky and hilarious, Flattery has taken the short story format into an exciting, energetic, and multifaceted dimension
Sunday Independent
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Startling, daring and dazzlingly dark
Colin Barrett
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Smart as a whip, unusual, and very very funny, Flattery's distinctive prose is a real treat
Claire-Louise Bennett
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Flattery tells the truth but tells it slant, so that from her sentences, to her symbolism, to her zany, often surrealist plots, her stories fizz with humour and surprise ... Flattery's writing – as subversive as it is original – has more than charm; acknowledging the terror, it celebrates the joy of humour in a hollow, imploding world
Irish Independent























