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
“Affecting and darkly funny . . . Posing biting questions about identity, sexuality and trauma, Show Them a Good Time is an offbeat yet moving look at contemporary womanhood.” —TIME Magazine
“The stories are brilliant, full of surprises.” —New York Times Book Review
“Outstanding . . . wry and devastating.” —Paris Review
“At its best, which is often, Flattery's prose has a thrilling relentlessness and rhythmical snap to it; it pummels and excites.” —The Guardian
“Flattery puts across finely observed everyday details with an absurd sensibility and has a talent for one-liners.” —The New Yorker
“Just when we think we know where Flattery is going, she disorients us by changing tack and veering off-course into surreal territory. . . The best tales blend personal pain and mordant wit, and are seductively offbeat and pleasingly on point.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“There's laughter in the dark and darkness in the laughter in these fabulously astute stories that are at once surreal and more real than reality. Nicole Flattery is so good.” —Melissa Broder, author of MILK FED
“Flattery is a rising star . . . Her debut collection is a magnificently mordant work, full of delicious one-liners, perennially creeping menace, and hypnotically nihilistic depictions of cold-eyed young women trapped in strange, lonely, sometimes dystopian situations . . . Reminiscent of the writing of Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Ottessa Moshfegh, Show Them a Good Time is a deft and dazzling work of pitch-black humor and deep, disquieting sorrow.” —LitHub
“Fabulously entertaining . . . very funny stuff. The pages just glide by, but there's really difficult material and really knotty emotions thrumming along just beneath the blithe surface of things.” —Kevin Barry, The Millions
“Brilliant . . . Ten smart stories about dating, relationships and the absurdities of modern life.” —Elle.com
“Highly addictive . . . Flattery's off-kilter voice blends chatty candour and hard-to-interpret allegory (think Diane Williams or Lorrie Moore), with the deadpan drollery and casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences.” —The Observer
“A blisteringly original and wickedly funny collection. . . 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” —Paperback Paris
“Mind-blowing; by turns macabre, ferociously funny and concerned with what's been called, 'the dark comedy of women's lives.' Like Rooney, Flattery sometimes focuses on the idea of 'normal' as a surreal concept with one character describing her hometown in Ireland as, 'a strange place dressed up as a normal place.” —Globe and Mail
“Flattery's judgments crackle with cruel, clear sight . . . The book's epigraph comes from Lorrie Moore, who is an obvious influence on the high-wire style, those seductive insights armored with glittering wit against the pain they describe. Flattery writes with empathy, freedom and virtuosic technique: this debut announces the arrival of a brilliant talent.” —Financial Times
“The book is a bit like drinking: refreshingly obliterative, realistically distorted . . . some of the most concrete aspects of the book are provided by the dialogue, which, as in Lorrie Moore or Deborah Eisenberg, often contains much of the stories' movement as it delivers funny little zaps to the main character's perspective.” —London Review of Books
“Nicole Flattery's short stories stab and slip, cutting without immediately alerting you to that fact . . . What sticks is her deadpan stare, the precision of her humor-that feeling that sometimes the funniest person in the room is the one who isn't laughing.” —The A.V. Club
“Flattery, whose stories have been compared to Lorrie Moore's, depicts dead-end jobs and the grinding fear of poverty. While her style is jaunty and enlivening-Groucho Marx funny-her young women are even less hopeful than Moore's. They're held hostage by the economic machinery of their lives . . . Beneath the one-liners and clever dark comedy, Show [Them] a Good Time shows real daring.” —Bookforum
“A seamless blend of reality and the surreal, Flattery's stories defy genre in an affecting yet unobtrusive manner. Readers should expect to be equal parts intrigued and unsettled.” —Publishers Weekly
“Flattery's prose-absurd, painfully funny, and bracingly original-slingshots the stories forward. These female characters never say what you're expecting, and their insights are always incisive . . . Nervy, audacious stories in which women finally get to speak their minds.” —Kirkus Reviews
“With loads of strangeness, humor, and really great lines, Flattery writes women's uncanny and true lives.” —Booklist
“Smart as a whip, unusual, and very, very funny, Flattery's distinctive prose is a real treat.” —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of POND
“Startling, daring, and dazzlingly dark.” —Colin Barrett, author of YOUNG SKINS
“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, author of RESERVOIR 13
