PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel 2025, Longlist
A Vulture Best Book of 2024
In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner鈥檚 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 鈥淛ake鈥 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鈥檚 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鈥攈igh-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.
鈥Atta Boy is a truly great NYC novel. A very perceptive, accurate, and imaginative take on our times. Fiedorek has a brilliant ear for dialogue and her characters are richly drawn and specific. It鈥檚 moving, funny, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. I turned these pages compulsively.鈥濃擬ichael Imperioli
鈥淐ally Fiedorek鈥檚 Atta Boy is a Bonfire of the Vanities for the twenty-first century鈥攁 propulsive, unforgettable journey through a deeply stratified New York. From brawling barrooms to the glittering co-ops of Park Avenue, this is a fearless chronicle of the way we live and where we are headed. Fiedorek is an urgent writer for these times, with an unstinting eye for the class divisions that define who we are. I couldn鈥檛 put Atta Boy down.鈥濃擱oss Barkan, author, The Night Burns Bright
鈥淚n a lukewarm literary landscape, Cally Fiedorek鈥檚 Atta Boy blazes like a burning copy of the New York Post chucked from an open window of the 1 train. Fiedorek is a writer to watch鈥攁nd watch out for.鈥濃擜ndrew Ridker, author, Hope
鈥Atta Boy is a New York novel like I鈥檝e never read before. Lively, madcap, and frequently hilarious, but not without sensitivity and insight too. Via its cast of all-too-human characters, Cally Fiedorek whisks us from dim barrooms to gleaming penthouses to examine the complexities and compromises of being alive today.鈥濃擱achel Khong, author, Real Americans
鈥淎n insightful portrait of clashing socioeconomic worlds.鈥濃擭athalie Atkinson, author, Zed Book Club
