Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery’s novel Nothing Special was published in March.

How many times? Catherine Lacey

Nicole Flattery, 16 July 2020

Catherine Lacey’s​ last book, Certain American States (2018), a short story collection, began with an epigraph from Annie Baker’s play Circle Mirror Transformation:

LAUREN: Hey. Um. This is kind of weird – but do you ever wonder how many times your life is gonna end?

(Another silence.)

SCHULTZ: Uh … I’m not sure I know what you –

LAUREN: Like how many people...

Bury that bastard

Nicole Flattery, 5 March 2020

Everyso often a magazine will publish a graph that proves, beyond any measure of doubt, that Hollywood is sexist, with a particular bias against middle-aged women. I’m not sure for whom this information is intended. Somebody who has never seen a film but likes graphs? Somebody so insulated from the real world that they’ve never strolled past a multiplex and caught a glimpse of...

Proudly Reptilian: Kevin Barry

Nicole Flattery, 12 September 2019

It’s​ a stereotypical Irish scene. A beleaguered man is tending to a failing and unhappy farm. There’s trouble in the poultry shed. If this were a film, there would be close-ups of a sweat-ridden brow, a taut, unending blue sky, the rugged earth. What wrenches you out of this fantasy is the first line of dialogue, delivered matter-of-factly by the farmer, John, to his wife:...

In​ ‘Abortion, a Love Story’, the long story at the centre of Nicole Flattery’s first collection, a young woman, Natasha, tells the professor on whom she’s about to...

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