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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION FLATTERY | 31330009358502 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC FLATTERY | 32114002778075 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Boxford Town Library | FIC FLATTERY | 32115002236451 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/FLATTERY | 31480011687313 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC FLATTERY | 30470002120326 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/FLATTERY N | 31479007631509 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC FLATTERY, NICOLE | 32122003036435 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC FLA | 32124002140267 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | FLA | 32127001369407 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F FLATTERY | 31478010236686 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC FLATTERY N | 31550002580931 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC FLATTERY | 32129002598315 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION FLATTERY | 32132003402693 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | FIC FLATTERY | 32133002700343 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tyngsborough Public Library | FIC/FLATT | 32137002214502 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F FLATTERY | 31990005277152 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND TIME
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the inspired latest from Irish writer Flattery (Show Them a Good Time), a woman looks back on her disaffected youth in 1960s New York City, where she falls into the Andy Warhol scene. In 2010, Mae reflects on her estrangement from her late mother, which intensified in 1966 when Mae was 17 and feeling aliened from family, classmates, and city. She drops out of high school for a secretarial position working for Andy Warhol, and works at his studio with teenage runaway Shelley transcribing two years of Andy's tape recordings. Invigorated by the work and her friendship with Shelley, Mae feels most connected to the scene while listening to the tapes, believing it's the "only thing worth doing." On them, art stars such as Ondine divulge their intimate secrets. Over time, the vanity and voyeurism surrounding Mae prompts her to turn inward, and she starts inserting her own personality into the transcriptions, which drives a wedge between herself and the studio. In a canny move, Warhol's factory, shown only amorphously, is stripped of the usual mythology and comes across more sweatshop than creative hotbed, a "doll house, with girls arranged everywhere." Against this gloomy background, a self-possessed Mae tries to find her 15 minutes of fame. Flattery's fresh take on familiar lore makes this something special indeed. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (July)
Guardian Review
Someone should write a thesis on the titles that young women from Ireland are giving their novels. Normal People. Exciting Times. Nothing Special. "My characters inhabit coffee shops, they take long, pointless walks, they conduct themselves without aim or ambition," Nicole Flattery once said, underselling her debut collection, Show Them a Good Time, about protagonists not entirely unlike herself - a reader trap common among Flattery's cohort - navigating millennial work and womanhood in surreal tales lit up by off-kilter phrase-making. Yet at a time when plausibly autofictional debuts often give way to plausibly autofictional follow-ups, there was no little intrigue in the announcement that Flattery was at work on a novel about Andy Warhol and his Factory studio. What, you wondered, brought her to that already much-mythologised subject? And what could she possibly bring to it? In fact, the resulting novel, far from a curveball, makes perfect sense: a wry coming-of-age tale told by a lonely teenage girl in Warhol's orbit, Nothing Special could be an elaboration of one of Flattery's short stories, which frequently turn on a thirst for experience and the aftertaste of the charade required to achieve it. It centres on the making of Warhol's a, A Novel (1968), an experimental slice-of-life breeze block built from taped conversations typed up by two schoolgirls, one of whom Flattery imagines as our narrator, Mae. We join her in 2010, deep in middle age, before we cut quickly back to 1966, when she's 17, riding escalators with an eye out for male attention, having been cold-shouldered at school and left alone by her mother, a waitress with a drink problem and an on-off boyfriend whose household presence seldom seems healthy. While the method denies reader-friendly hand-holding, it avoids the hamminess that bedevils fiction about celebrities The tone - numb, ironic, smarter than thou - is, we understand, partly an act, as befits a teenager who steals her mother's bra to meet an older man or shoplifts a shirt for a job interview. When a doctor somewhat creepily points her towards a "friend [who] has an art studio, an expanding business, over on East 72nd Street, and always needs girls to go and do errands for him", it accelerates her desire for independence, not least because of the sexual content of the tapes she starts transcribing, to say nothing of the parties. More poignantly instructive is the precarious friendship she forms with another girl typist, likewise in flight from her upbringing. If there's a surprise, it lies in the boldly interior quality of Flattery's storytelling, in which psychological and emotional experience unspools as if for an unseen interlocutor. A mention of "Susan" (the actor Susan Bottomly, AKA International Velvet) goes unglossed and Warhol himself barely appears, not even by name; when, early on, Mae notices something "he would find amusing", it's down to us to know who she's talking about. While the method - Warhol as Wolf Hall - denies reader-friendly hand-holding (the jacket praise "demands repeated reading" could be taken two ways), it avoids the hamminess that bedevils fiction about celebrities. Ultimately, the thrilling sense of Flattery's aesthetic and intellectual stringency is what comes to define her seemingly low-key enterprise here. You could almost imagine someone reading Nothing Special and not even noticing Warhol at its heart, which may be the point of a novel that pictures the lives of his unseen instruments.
Kirkus Review
Andy Warhol and his Factory are seen from the disaffected point of view of a teenage typist in Flattery's bleakly funny debut novel. In 1966, 17-year-old Mae, living with a mercurial waitress mother and her mom's sometime boyfriend, is bored with school and alienated from her one friend there. After weeks spent riding department store escalators and a one-night stand with a creepy young businessman, Mae stumbles into a typing gig at Warhol's studio, one for which she is paid only occasionally, when there's some cash lying around. After a brief stint answering phones and typing up letters begging the parents of Warhol's hangers-on for money, she is assigned the task of typing up verbatim a series of tape recordings of conversations in the studio, mostly between Warhol and actor Ondine, which will form a fictionalized version of Warhol's book a, A Novel. Warhol, seldom mentioned by name, is a shadowy presence in the background of the commotion created by his followers, some of whom call him Drella, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. "Everyone else forgot about the tape recorder," Mae writes. "…Drella never did." The typists themselves play a complicated role in the goings-on, at least in their own minds. "For several hours a day we had all the power. Then we stepped into the real world and had none," Mae thinks. While oddly British locutions--ordinary New Yorkers saying things like "You've a very goofy personality" or "Will we order drinks?"--sometimes threaten the credibility of the novel, it pulls the reader deeply into Mae's increasingly fragile mind, where the desultory, performative conversations she spends her days transcribing threaten her ability to shape a life for herself. Like the conversations the young women transcribe, the novel is a strangely compelling combination of the soporifically mundane and the bracingly odd. Not just for Warhol fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Following her funny and hallucinatory story collection, Show Them a Good Time (2020), Flattery's witty, evocative, and interiorized first novel imagines a young woman's life as she drops out of high school and lands in Andy Warhol's Manhattan studio in 1967. Promising no ambitions for fame, Mae spends her days transcribing years' worth of cassette-tape recordings of studio goings-on that will become a book. She's rarely paid, and in the Factory's big, already-storied silver room, Mae and fellow girl-without-a-past Shelley sit facing a wall, not speaking to the people whose voices they get to know intimately: Andy, Ondine, Edie. Sometimes what Mae hears in her headphones upsets her, but as she surrenders to the scene, she finds power in the idea that she decides what ends up on the page--but this wouldn't be Mae's coming-of-age story if she were totally right. More than fictionalizing history (which she's clearly up on), 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.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT At 17, Mae is living an aimless and dissatisfied life in 1960s New York. She feels like an outsider at school and is unhappy living at home with her mother, who is addicted to alcohol, and with her mother's on-again, off-again boyfriend Mikey. As Mae searches for some purpose in her life, a series of random events lands her a job in the Factory, artist Andy Warhol's studio, where she works as a typist transcribing tapes for Warhol's book. There she befriends Shelley, another typist, and the two become voyeurs to and peripheral participants in the artistic chaos that is Warhol's loft. Mae becomes increasingly obsessed with what she is transcribing, to the point that the tapes become her entire world. When the transcription is finished, and Mae's role in the Factory is over, she struggles to regain her sense of self. Flattery (author of the story collection Show Them a Good Time) provides a harsh look at the line between art and voyeurism and the struggle to define oneself in a world of overwhelming influences. Given the setting, one would expect vibrant descriptions of 1960s counterculture. Instead, the novel provides an introspective take on the period and, like modern art, forces readers to look inside themselves for the meaning of the broad strokes on the page. VERDICT For fans of literary fiction and coming-of-age stories.--Elisabeth Clark