Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. She lives in New York City.
Her new novel is
Atta Boy.
At Electric Lit Fiedorek tagged eight
great books, including one play, that cut to the complicated heart of fraud and white-collar criminality, unflinching in how they examine human greed while evading facile definitions of good and evil, and keenly attuned to how razor-thin the defining line can be—between spin and lies, between corner-cutting and malfeasance, between good old-fashioned entrepreneurship and dangerous hucksterism.
One title on the list:
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
This was Shteyngart’s Trump novel, written in a fever dream in the summer of 2016, a way of preemptively reconciling himself with the behemoth on the horizon. Barry 
Cohen, a hedge-funder in crisis, is a curious and compelling inversion the Gordon Gekko-Patrick Bateman-Sherman McCoy rich-dude prototype, not a suave, confident master of the universe but an insecure, neurotic frump, haunted by visions of a purer, more fulfilling life, rich but not that rich (Shteyngart is hilariously attuned to the absurdity of wealth in contemporary New York, a misery-breeding status quo of constantly counting one’s neighbor’s money, in his hands, we’re improbably sympathetic to what furious upkeep it all requires). While the SEC puts the screws on his hedge fund after a bad investment with a Martin Shkreli-like fraudster, and his estranged wife grapples with their son’s autism diagnosis, he takes off across the country in search of absolution, and himself. Tender, melancholy, and amazingly well-observed, this was definitely a touchstone for me in conjuring the world and tone of Atta Boy.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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