Nicole Flattery

In John Cheever’s​ Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are...

Anyone who grew up​ in a small Irish town knows what it feels like to live under surveillance. Tech autocrats have nothing on the curtain twitchers of Irish villages. In The Pilgrimage, first published in 1961 and recently reissued by McNally Editions, John Broderick writes that ‘the city dweller who passes through a country town and imagines it as sleepy and apathetic is very far from...

Candy Darling​, the transgender actress and Warhol superstar, was born in Queens in 1944 and grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island. She was raised as Jimmy Slattery – named after her father, a gambler and alcoholic who worked as a cashier for the New York Racing Association. As Cynthia Carr writes in her biography, Darling broke with her Jimmy identity early: ‘She was always...

Patrick deWitt​ is the sort of writer you imagine checking his emails on an old desktop computer in the library. His five deceptively simple novels suggest pleasant, old-fashioned things. They hinge on traditional plot devices – misunderstandings, a letter delivered or undelivered, a chance meeting. There is no modern technology here. In deWitt’s first novel, Ablutions (2009),...

Lynne Tillman​ doesn’t believe in redemption. ‘Contemporary novels,’ she complained in 2001, ‘have become a repository for salvation; characters – and consequentially readers – are supposed to be saved at the end.’ Tillman has always avoided sentimentality. ‘Detachment would keep her fresh, it was a kind of freedom,’ the narrator says in...