The debut short story collection from Nicole Flattery, winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. ‘I first encountered Nicole Flattery’s work through the Stinging Fly, and I’m forever grateful I did’ SALLY ROONEY
‘Demands repeated reading. These stories are very funny, and very sad, usually at the same time. Which, as Flattery shows us brilliantly, is the best time’ JON MCGREGOR
An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types – men and women, their assigned roles and meanings – in today’s society.
A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York. Angela makes her way through a series of meaningless, dead-end dates in a basement restaurant. Two university students collaborate on a play – but the unemployment office lurks around the corner.
Exuberant and irreverent, accomplished and unexpected, it marks the arrival of an extraordinary new Irish voice in fiction.
- Launching a huge new literary talent, Nicole Flattery is a phenomenal young Irish writer and the winner of the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize, won in 2016 by Man Booker Prize-longlisted Sophie Mackintosh
- Her stories have been chosen for best-of round-ups by Gavin Corbett, Jon McGregor and Sally Rooney
- Flattery is often cited as one of the most interesting writers to emerge on the Irish writing scene. This collection is being published in Ireland by the Stinging Fly, which has been credited with discovering and publishing the majority of new Irish literary talent
- An astounding debut full of urgent, disorientating and painfully funny stories, Show Them a Good Time will be followed by Flattery’s debut novel in 2021
Reviews
“I first encountered Nicole Flattery’s work through the Stinging Fly, and I’m forever grateful I did” – Sally Rooney
“Startling, daring and dazzlingly dark” – Colin Barrett
Author Biography
Nicole Flattery’s work has been published in the Stinging Fly, the White Review, the Dublin Review, BBC Radio 4, the Irish Times, Winter Papers and the forthcoming 2019 Faber anthology of new Irish writing. Her story ‘Track’ won the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize. She is twenty-nine years old and lives in Galway.