Show them a good time

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Title:

Show them a good time

Added Title:

Sweet talk.

Hump.

Abortion : a love story.

Track.

Parrot.

You're going to forget me before I forget you.

Not the end yet.

Author:

Flattery, Nicole, author.

Summary:

"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." -- Provided by publisher.

General Note:

First published in 2019 in the Republic of Ireland by The Stinging Fly.

Contents:

Show them a good time -- Sweet talk -- Hump -- Abortion, a love story -- Track -- Parrot -- You're going to forget me before I forget you -- Not the end yet.

Physical Description:

238 pages ; 22 cm

Genre:

Short stories.

Subject Term:

Women -- Fiction.

Women -- Sexual behavior -- Fiction.

Sexism -- Fiction.

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Publishing,

Publication Date:

2020

ISBN:

9781635574296

Publication Information:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Call Number:

FLATTERY

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003464958	Adult Fiction	FLATTERY Nicole	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"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.

Author Notes

Nicole Flattery 's work has been published in The Stinging Fly, The White Review, The Dublin Review , BBC Radio 4, The Irish Times and Winter Papers. She has also contributed a story to Faber's 2019 Anthology of New Irish Writing. A graduate of the master's program in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, she lives in Galway.

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Disenchanted characters maneuver through difficult settings in Flattery's surreal and offbeat debut collection. Though diverse in content, the stories come together through their dystopian elements and comparably cynical protagonists. In "Sweet Talk," a young teen falls for her father's employee against the backdrop of a series of mysterious disappearances of multiple women in her hometown. In "Track," the girlfriend of a has-been comedian withstands neglect and abuse from him while secretly contributing to his downfall through an internet forum. The title story tells of a former adult film actress who confronts workplace politics at her new job as a gas station attendant. A woman navigates dating during the apocalypse and finds it to be equally as disappointing in "Not the End Yet." In "Abortion, a Love Story," two college misfits unite to produce a stage play that questions the expectations forced upon them as adults. A seamless blend of reality and the surreal, Flattery's stories defy genre in an affecting yet unobtrusive manner. Readers should expect to be equal parts intrigued and unsettled. (Jan.)