We’re delighted to be working with the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing to host Nicole Flattery and Richard Milward as part of their Literature Live series. Nicole and Richard will be talking about their latest novels NOTHING SPECIAL and MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER with host Luke Brown.

About the books:

Nicole Flattery – Nothing Special

New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down 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.

Nothing Special is a whip-smart coming-of-age story about friendship, independence and the construction of art and identity, bringing to life the experience of young women in this iconic and turbulent moment.

Richard Milward – Man-Eating Typewriter

‘I am an ugly man, a meese meshigena-omi, but a fashionable omi. And soon to be a molto famous omi. Lell my lapper.’

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter – but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet’s jailbird fantasies, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.

About the authors:

Nicole Flattery’s short story collection Show Them a Good Time was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. Her work has appeared in the White Review, the Stinging Fly and the London Review of Books. She lives in Dublin.

Richard Milward was born in Middlesbrough in 1984. His cult debut Apples was published in 2007 when Richard was twenty-two years old, followed by Ten Storey Love Song in 2009 and Kimberly’s Capital Punishment in 2012. Apples was shortlisted for The South Bank Show/Times Breakthrough Award 2008, Ten Storey Love Song was chosen as one of Waterstones New Voices 2009, and Kimberly’s Capital Punishment was picked as Time Out Book of the Week in 2012. Both Apples and Ten Storey Love Song were adapted for the stage, winning awards at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of either book. NOTHING SPECIAL and MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER will also be available to purchase on the night and both authors will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.