Nothing Special
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Nothing Special
Narrated by:
Becca Stewart
Buy Now for £13.46
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Narrated by:
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Becca Stewart
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By:
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Nicole Flattery
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE NEW YORKER AND TIME
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023 by HARPER'S, THE GUARDIAN, BUSTLE, AND NYLON
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.©2023 Nicole Flattery (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
I truly love Nicole Flattery's writing.
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.
Flattery exhibits a keen eye for how often what looks like an escape hatch is another trap . . . a sneakily moving homage to human kindness.
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.
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.
Nothing Special gives us a lens through which we see girlhood as a narrative of process, of artistic choice.
Flattery has a keener sense than most American writers of class resentment . . . a talented novel.
Every line seems to thrill and break in an indifferent social space, and the result is very moving.
Nothing Special offers a glimpse of the fracturing experience of fame . . . Flattery uses [this] as an entry point to profound questions about who and what our culture values, and what this says about us . . . caustic, funny.
Nicole Flattery [is] a raucously talented young Irish writer . . . witty, propulsive and darkly delightful to read.
Deftly woven and captivating
With a healthy dash of dark humor, [NOTHING SPECIAL] showcases Flattery’s unflinching observations of human complexity.
Flattery’s coming-of-age debut novel is a bold and brilliant examination of an iconic—and ultimately hollow—movement from the vantage point of its most invisible cogs . . . The subversive approach to a familiar modern mythos, the cool-but-crackling dialogue, the knotty psychological portrait of its rescued-and-reimagined protagonist. Between this brava debut, and her weirdly-compelling 2020 collection Show Them a Good Time, Flattery has already established herself one of the most talented and intriguing writers at work in Ireland today.
An enjoyable novel - astute and propulsive.
Witty, evocative, and interiorized . . . Flattery aims to catch a spirit here, of youthful rebellion as it ignites, and her vision of the layers of exploitation that make up Mae's task is clear, and addictively delivered.
Bleakly funny... compelling... not just for Warhol fans.
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