The Center for Fiction Presents Cally Fiedorek on Atta Boy with Ben Purkert

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 10, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Atta Boy (Cover) Large

We are thrilled to welcome back Cally Fiedorek, 2019 alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, to celebrate the launch of her debut novel Atta Boy. The book follows Rudy Coyle, a ne’er-do-well from Flushing, Queens who becomes the doorman at an elegant Park Avenue apartment building. There he gets swept up in the affairs of the Cohen family, whose voluble patriarch, Jake, takes Rudy under his wing. As Jake, a millionaire taxi mogul, tries to save his company from an industry-wide debt crisis, Rudy is drawn closer into the world of his neglected, charismatic family. Atta Boy is both a thrilling New York crime comedy and a heartfelt coming-of-age tale. Ben Purkert, poet and author of The Men Can’t Be Saved, joins Fiedorek for a discussion about her debut novel and how she crafted this rich tale of clashing socioeconomic worlds. After the event, Fiedorek will sign books.

Atta Boy (Cover) Large

In Conversation

  • AuthorPortrait-Fiedorek Large

    Cally Fiedorek

    Cally Fiedorek

    Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and an alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. Atta Boy is her debut novel. She lives in New York City.

  • Ben Purkert by Beowulf Sheehan

    Ben Purkert

    Ben Purkert

    Ben Purkert’s debut novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, was named one of Vanity Fair’s Favorite 20 Books of 2023. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and he’s been featured by NPR, Esquire, and the Boston Globe. He is also the author of the poetry collection, For the Love of Endings. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He is the founding editor of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He teaches in the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program.


    Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Featured Book

  1. . 
    Atta Boy (Cover) Large

    Atta Boy

    By Cally Fiedorek

    Published by University Of Iowa Press

    PURCHASE

    n December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.

    Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.

    By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

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