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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 (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 240 |
| ISBN | 9781526662545 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Every line seems to thrill and break in an indifferent social space, and the result is very moving
Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year
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[A] blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel . . . [Flattery] captures the absurdity and the pain, the texture of city streets and the squalid luxury, and brings a deadpan wit to the whole sex and drugs and Pop-art scene
Spectator
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A raucously talented young Irish writer ... Flattery is witty, propulsive and darkly delightful to read
Economist
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Sixties New York is vividly conveyed, but the triumph is in the capture of moody, prickly, ambitious Mae through whose eyes everything is seen . . . [A] witty and unique coming-of-age novel
Daily Mail
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The author of short story collection Show Them A Good Time is one to watch . . . Exploring the rift between their public and private selves, this darkly funny tale draws parallels between 60s New York and today
Stylist
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Flattery has a fine ear for dialogue . . . 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

























