Nicole Flattery is more intelligent and a lot funnier than most writers; this fact is writ large in her wonderful debut collection. ‘Show Them a Good Time’ is one of her best stories – against some stiff competition – and captures a sense of our times in a way that is contemporary, clever, but not faddish. A singular writer and a singular story.
First published in Show Them a Good Time, Stinging Fly/Bloomsbury, 2019
I think Nicole Flattery is one of the funniest writers working today – a lowkey and often macabre humour that sneaks in via her strangely affectless tone. In ‘Track’, a young Irish girl tolerates, and occasionally sabotages, her older comedian boyfriend, with whom she lives (or rather coexists) in a New York apartment. Essentially a story about an abusive relationship, ‘Track’ is unerringly precise and painful in its treatment of alienation – whether alienation from a relationship or from the wildly anonymizing experience of living in a city, crowded yet alone.
First published in The White Review, April 2017, and available to read online here. Collected in Show Them A Good Time, Bloomsbury, 2019
