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Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery's criticism has appeared in the GuardianThe Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time was published in 2019. Her favourite Chantal Akeman film is News From Home.



Articles Available Online


Chantal Akerman’s ‘My Mother Laughs’

Book Review

October 2019

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

October 2019

There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only...

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore's ‘See What Can Be Done’

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction to See What Can Be Done that, at the start of her career,...

Laure Prouvost begins to tell us about something that happened this morning She woke up with four vegetables on her duvet (a tomato, a carrot, a lemon and an onion) and four corresponding holes in the ceiling of her bedroom The vegetables must have fallen from the sky in the night, she concludes, even though they are the kind that grows out of the ground Perhaps they were a gift from a higher power, a sign that her missing grandfather, a conceptual artist and friend of Kurt Schwitters, is still alive? He started digging a hole that would reach from his house in North London all the way to Africa, but he has disappeared, leaving his wife to grow fat (apparently she eats crisps all the time) The rooms in her grandparents’ house are covered in mud, absolutely covered in mud There is mud everywhere, she says – it covers the walls and the floor and the furniture A priest has told her the vegetables probably dropped from a plane or something Vegetables dropping from a plane seems more implausible than a sign from god, even to a priest ‘Gracious goodness me!’ said Chicken-licken, ‘the sky must have fallen; I must go and tell the King’   Prouvost has been invited by Wysing Arts Centre to stage a performance Lansdowne House, situated in the Cambridgeshire countryside, to around seventy people seated on the kind of gold chairs you might find at a wedding reception (there is a marquee outside)  She speaks into a microphone, breathy and close – she is confessing after all And then she starts shouting – ‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ Her face is red and her hair is all over the place, aping the actions of a woman in the story she is telling who regularly strips naked and jumps out of a plane with a rope tied around her ankles The woman has been calling for Prouvost’s lost grandfather too, even though, as she has just told us, he is lost deep underground She asks that we find our own way to help look for him   Prouvost makes videos, but also

Contributor

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Contributor

January 2018

Nicole Flattery’s criticism has appeared in the Guardian, The Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good...

Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Her Body and Other Parties’

Book Review

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

January 2018

I’m reluctant to admit this but it’s often easier for me to write about a book I hated rather than a book I loved....

READ NEXT

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July 2012

Ways of Submission

Saskia Vogel

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July 2012

On a pale marble fountain in Dubrovnik, I posed. I pretended I too was a stone figure, water gushing...

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July 2012

Theatre's Arab Turn

Tanjil Rashid

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July 2012

Apart from the odd Shakespearean exception, from Othello the Moor of Venice to the Merchant of Venice’s marginal Moroccan...

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September 2014

Paris at Night

Matthew Beaumont

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September 2014

The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel...

 

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