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Nothing Special
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Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND TIME
From the author Sally Rooney called “bold, irreverent, and agonizingly funny,” a wildly original coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl working at Andy Warhol's Factory in 1960s New York.
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a rundown 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.
Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends. Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement. Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, this should be the most enlivening experience of Mae's life. But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.
For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mary Gaitskill, this blistering, mordantly funny debut novel brilliantly interrogates the nature of friendship and independence and the construction of art and identity. 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.
Product details
| Published | Jul 11 2023 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 240 |
| ISBN | 9781635574326 |
| 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

























