Nothing Special: : Nicole Flattery: Bloomsbury Publishing

Nothing Special

Description

In the late 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol set out to make an unconventional novel by following a cast of his most famous characters around New York, recording their conversations with his tape recorder. The twenty-four one-hour tapes were transcribed by four women: The Velvet Underground's drummer Maureen Tucker, a Barnard student Susan Pile, and two young women.

In Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery imagines the lives of those high school students: precocious and wise beyond their years but still only teenagers, living with their mothers but working all day in the surreal and increasingly dangerous world of Andy Warhol's Factory, and learning to shape and reshape their identities as they navigate between their low-paid, grueling jobs and their lives at home, in a time of social change for girls and women in America.

This blistering, mordantly funny debut interrogates the nature of fantasy and reality, voyeurism and language, and celebrity and the construction of identity. Within the framework of Andy Warhol's surreal world, Flattery asks us to consider at what point does the creation, and consumption, of our public selves turn us into something we don't recognise?

PRAISE FOR SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME

'A masterclass . . . Bold, irreverent and agonisingly funny' Sally Rooney
'Announces the arrival of a brilliant talent' Financial Times
'Explores difficult questions about self-worth, agency and intimacy with thrilling sharpness' Sunday Times
'Demands repeated reading' Jon McGregor

Product details

Published	Mar 02 2023
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	240
ISBN	9781526612106
Imprint	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery is the author of the story collect…

I truly love Nicole Flattery's writing.

Sally Rooney, Author of NORMAL PEOPLE and CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS
Exquisitely disorienting . . . Gorgeous . . . This is a story of a young woman and the pocket of stale air that separates her from the world and from herself, the static between authenticity and performance, fantasy and reality . . . Brave and effective.

The New York Times
Flattery exhibits a keen eye for how often what looks like an escape hatch is another trap . . . a sneakily moving homage to human kindness.

The New Yorker
In fitting her complex, heartfelt, vexing characters into the spaces left where the names of Warhol's typists should have been, Flattery is finally giving those egos, or a version of them, a chance to tell their own story, in their own words.

Guardian
Flattery takes an inspired approach to showing how the stuff of our daily existence can, when mediated through technology, be made into a fiction. By writing of a pre-digital past that was so preoccupied with replicating and documenting itself, turning life into a performance, Flattery shows us that what's changed isn't human nature, just our technologies . . . The image[s] she conjures may ring true to many readers, a stark reminder of the fact that today, we're all living a performance, in a modern-day Factory, whether we like it or not.

The Atlantic
Nothing Special gives us a lens through which we see girlhood as a narrative of process, of artistic choice.

The Washington Post