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.
