Alissa Nutting - I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people.Each story is twisted by some unreal condition: the porn star works in space, gnomes and fake deer become animated, and a woman is served as dinner

Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, Starcherone Books, 2010.

„This is maybe the most innovative short story collection that I’ve read over the last year. The stories vary in length, generally between two and twenty pages long, but regardless of length, Nutting immediately and persuasively busts into a surreal world running parallel to ours. Think Kelly Link or Stephen Millhauser. One might also think of of Tao Lin in the way that the absurd interrupts the insipid day-to-day, but where Lin (and frankly, just about all of Muumuu House) withdrawl into a detached observational tone, Nutting maintains an emotional urgency. There is seeming thrilling in witnessing characters that are desperately needing the small comforts of other people while pummeled with ridiculous mutations of waking life.
Here’s how the book opens:
I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.
The guy next to me resembles Elvis because of his fluffy, vaugely-pubic black hairdo. It may be the humidity.
Across the kettle a man is trying to cry, but his tears keep mixing with his sweat and instead of looking sad he just seems extra warm. For a moment, I have the romantic thought that maybe we are actually boiling in tears, hundres of thousands of them, the sweetest-true tears of infants and children instead of yellowy, chickenish broth.“ – Matt Pine

„Alissa Nutting's debut, winner of the sixth annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, is a sequence of surreal narratives combining the genre bending of Kelly Link, the dystopian angst of George Saunders, and the absurd scatology of Adult Swim cartoons. Protagonists are defined not so much by their titular careers—the volume's contents are listed in a "Table of Jobs" that includes "Porn Star," “Bandleader’s Girlfriend,” and “Knife Thrower”—as by the emotional conflicts dissembled through working life. The narrator of “Porn Star” is the prize in a twisted reality competition on adult television: “Our show’s executives decided to do a space episode for the season finale to keep up with the current trend of filming in extreme and sensational locations.” The narrator in “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” is similarly (in)famous, this time for being partnered with a tripped-out rock star who sees defecation as a religious experience. Eclectically bizarre, these stories are unified by Nutting’s deadpan prose, which skewers human vanity ranging from celebrity culture to environmental neglect. The more one lingers in Nutting’s narrative funhouse, the harder it is to shake off its revealing distortions.“ - Pedro Ponce

„The Pitch: The title is an accurate description: each story in the collection is narrated by a woman with a different job. This ranges from “Zookeeper” to “Porn Star” to occupations that aren’t necessarily money-making, like “Alcoholic” or “Cat Owner.”
First Line: “I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people.”
The Twist: Despite being tuned into contemporary voices, Nutting isn’t trying to pull off some faux Studs Turkel volume about woman’s work. Each story is twisted by some unreal condition: the porn star works in space, gnomes and fake deer become animated, and a woman is served as dinner.
She-man”: “My boyfriend Ginno is a pro-bowler. It is not a glamorous as it doesn’t sound. I was on the streets for a long time so I took the first chance I got to settle down. Ginno doesn’t know I’m really a man, but other than that we’re completely honest with one another.”
Openings: The clarity and economy of Nutting’s prose is never more evident than in her opening paragraphs. The world of each story in this collection is neatly packed and explained in just a few sentences. No matter how surreal the situation is, we always know exactly what is going on.
“Teenager”: “I am sixteen years old and I cannot have Luke Gunter’s baby. I have seen my older cousin’s deflated football breasts. They have weird marks and lines that make them seem like optical illusions, like how pencils placed into glasses of water appear broken.”
First person: The consistently clear, first-person voice is almost always an asset to her stories, but, after reading eighteen of them in a row, the narrators start to sound a little too similar.
Background: Nutting is the fiction editor of Witness and the managing editor of the Fairy Tale Review. The manuscript for this book won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.
Hype quote: “Nutting’s outrageous and excruciating writing makes my face split open with laughter, often in public. She’s glorious chaos and utterly original — read her with joy,” Lydia Millet, author of Love in Infant Monkeys
Real Talk: This collection is full of sick imagination, hairy phrases, and risky premises, but Nutting tempers all of her impulses with her most subtle quality — finding the real in the surreal.“ - Wyatt Williams

"This collection of short stories won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, and I love the fearlessness of the author. The world herein is our world but wackier, as if the weirdest of our natives were the only ones to survive the nuclear blast and repopulated the earth. As a result, Nutting gets away with some of the wildest figurative language I've seen. Last semester I talked with my grad class about similes and metaphors and the conclusion I came to (whether or not I really convinced them) is figurative language is much more about setting tone than anything else. It may seem at first glance like it's meant to convey scents and touches and tastes, but really that's rarely the case. Literal language is pretty good at describing literal things. Figurative language is much more about describing feelings--how we feel when we see a sunset, not what we actually see. And so Nutting's figurative language is often about creating the mood..which is often uncomfortable and even a little scary. Case in point was the line Twitter wouldn't let me write all of: "I was like a turd inside of someone who'd accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special." If that image doesn't make you deeply uncomfortable with the narrator's state of mind, well, you're not me.
"I love a book with a good title. I love good titles in general. When I’m bored, I sit around writing titles, placing each one in its own Word file so when I feel like writing but want to work on something new, I just need to look at all those empty, waiting documents, pick the one with the title that intrigues me the most, and start writing. Ever since I first heard of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting (Starcherone Books), I have been charmed by the title and I finally had the chance to really sit down with the book. I ended up reading it one sitting because it was one of those books you literally cannot put down. The stories in this collection are smart and imaginative and strange and fearless in their execution. It is readily evident why this book won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. A great deal of care and handling went into these stories.
In Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, Charles Harris writes, “The absurdist vision may be defined as the belief that we are trapped in a meaningless universe and that neither God nor man, theology nor philosophy, can make sense of the human condition.” As I’ve read about Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls over the past couple months, I’ve often seen references to the writing as absurdist fiction. I would disagree. While many of the stories have a surreal, almost absurd quality to them, the stories by no means imply that they are a response to a belief that we are trapped in a meaningless universe because so many of the characters in these stories are clinging to the hope that there is, indeed, some meaning in the universe. In each of these stories, Nutting is, above all making beautiful sense of the human condition.
What I really appreciated is how several of the stories toyed with the implausible but did so in, well, very plausible ways. “Deliverywoman,” for example, takes place in the (somewhat near) future. The protagonist, who goes by CargoBabe when she’s chatting online with her Internet boyfriend Brady, is an intergalactic deliverywoman. She has made plans to meet Brady, finally, after a long correspondence but first, she buys her mother, Debbie “The Destroyer” Harlow, a criminal who has been cryogenically frozen, at the government’s penal system auction. CargoBabe brings her mother home and debates whether or not she should unfreeze her mother, at Brady’s suggestion, and when she finally does, her reunion with her mother, suffice it to say, does not go as planned. The story is crazy, and yet everything makes sense. The setting is different, and seems wildly implausible, but the heart of this story is about love and loneliness and family and betrayal, themes with which we are all familiar. The balance between the unfamiliar and impossible with the familiar is what makes Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls such a great book.
In each story about an unclean job for women or girls, I also felt like Nutting was creating narratives around the insecurities women live with—insecurities about beauty, bodies, responsibilities, sexuality. In “Model’s Assistant,” a woman is engaged in a somewhat masochistic friendship with a Swedish supermodel named Garla, clinging desperately to the benefits of walking in the wake of a beautiful person. “Porn Star” is the story of a woman who is going to have anal sex on the moon with a reality show contestant. The story ends, “I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.” Even amidst an absurd scenario, Nutting creates these quiet, vulnerable moments that are hard to forget.
Nutting also captures different voices very well. In “Teenager,” a sixteen year old getting an abortion and the complex web of relationships, unique to teenagers, between the narrator, her boyfriend, her best friend and her best friend boyfriends. The narrator is at once worldly and naif, an adult, and a child and the way the story balances these different roles is one of the most interesting tensions throughout the story. “Dancing Rat,” introduces a narrator who plays a mouse on a children’s musical dance program She and her boyfriend are busy having conception free sex and the narrator is being bossed around by Missy, one of the child actors on the show. “Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already know more than she should.” Again, there’s a real balance in how Nutting writes these characters—the precocious child, the woman doesn’t know if she’s infertile or how she feels about that infertility and what two such people could possibly be to each other.
When I read, I look to books and their writers to teach me about what I can accomplish in my own writing. In reading Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, I had a great opportunity to think about stretching my imagination more, about taking more risks and trusting myself to take those risks. That’s truly what Nutting is doing with this collection of remarkable, fierce stories, taking big but calculated risks, trusting her audience and trusting her own writing. You should definitely check this book out. It will take you places and teach you things." - Roxane Gay

"Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a collection of eighteen short stories about women, animals, and objects existing in the underbelly. Perverted and beautiful, these stories deal with the shame of having bodies, and the ways in which we use them to corrupt each other. Characters live in impossible worlds made possible by everyday motion. Porn stars engage in anal sex on the moon; a woman goes to hell and falls in love with the devil; lobsters say goodbye to each other as they boil to death. The stories are boozy, unnerving, and funny. If Mary Gaitskill and Julio Cortázar together birthed a piglet, it could very well be this collection.
These jobs (“Model’s Assistant,” “Alcoholic,” “Zoo Keeper,” “Porn Star,” “Delivery Woman,” etc.) are roles, identities designed to cage women bloated with hope for lives unlived. Nutting’s women are trapped inside performances directed by others to harness the swelling of desire. But there is the dream-state; the untamed night where a sliver of light can escape through bedroom doors leading to a kind of grace found in secret shame. In "Gardener," a sexually unfulfilled housewife lusts after a ceramic garden gnome. Each night she watches her gnome fuck various female milkmaid gnomes: "How he watched me when he was with them, and how I watched him. At first I only watched; I felt like such a simple old woman. But after a while, I began to touch myself while they played, and I watched them watch me. Often I'd cry because their miniature world was just so beautiful. I felt like my love was a giant blanket, the top of a tent, and each night they all came inside of it to move around and make me warm." It’s a woman’s hungry fantasy fed by loneliness, rejection, and sexual insecurity, but there is potential in her dreaming, a calming want fulfilled by the illogical. These women are carried from the dark to the light as they are carried from shame to hope. The transference of energy from a ruined woman to a redeemed woman is the air drying an open wound, the formation of new skin. Nutting handles these transformations delicately, but also humorously, fingering our ears and then eating the wax. Our purest state is at our most humiliated.
What I find important about Nutting’s work is the abandonment of rules, of any boundaries placed on a text by genre. It isn’t about “magical realism” or “science fiction” so much as it is about bored bodies leaking in the afternoon. There is no need to cheeseball the bizarre when its effect is pure and familiar. Something happens every day but not everyone sees it; Nutting sees this Something and more. Her women are you, your mother, your sister, that same fat which can both soothe and destroy. The way a collection like this defeats categorization is in the refusal of a politic.
This is not to say that these stories are without statement. Nutting recognizes gender for the fucked game it is, and violation via structure, via holding, is what Nutting intends to untangle, knot by knot. A shaky foundation for bodies to slip through, these stories give way to fantastic chaos in which we lose sense of meaning, moments, memory, and performance. Without boundaries, the body is capable.
In my favorite story, "Ant Colony," bodies are used to house Earth's creatures. "When space on Earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies." A beautiful actress becomes a trial study in the effort to store an ant colony inside bone. At first, she can't feel the ants moving inside her, but can sense their presence. "I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful.” Then, the insects begin to eat from within and transform the host body: “'I’m becoming them,’ I said one night when I heard my doctor swish in. ‘I’m becoming the ants.’” Rather than panic at the doctor’s orchestration of her transformation and his fashioning a stomach-portal through which her ants will travel through to his body, the actress finds serenity in the disorientating horror of bodies as hallways. “The rest of the world thinks that you’ve died,” the doctor says, and it is in this obliteration she comes out new. No name, no job, no face, only “Eat, Walk, Lift, Chomp.” The actress transcends her bodily existence through the limitations of instinct, functioning efficiently without the mess of gendered physicality. What is abandoned is the shell." - Lorian Long

"Alissa’s book won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, which was chosen by Ben Marcus. That’s promising!
While the innovative qualities aren’t obvious to me, as it seems to be a somewhat traditional collection of meaty, action oriented humorous short stories, I enjoyed it very much. I’m hard to please when it comes to fiction that isn’t clearly experimental, and this one did it for me.
I found my self marveling over the incredible imagination, the masterful storytelling, and the complete absurdity that was so intense it left me breathless at times, saying WOW! Out loud, multiple times, after I had laid the book down by my bed, and was lying there, staring, eyes extra wide open, stunned.
If you have a very weak stomach, I would say you’ll need a friend to censor this book before you read it. There will be black lines drawn through enough passages to make it look like a document released by the Freedom of Information Act.
The humor may not be elevating, wholesome, and inspiring as to the beauties of our human race. It may leave you feeling a little dark about being alive, at the same time you are laughing inside at nearly every line. You may even feel like throwing up sometimes, in the same way you might if you drink too much rum with a pirate who is devilishly handsome while he steals your mother’s underwear when she isn’t looking.
The narrator of “Dinner” begins the collection by boiling in a kettle along with five others. The language immediately as obviously timed so perfectly to make a wry impression, I have to suspect she’s one of those people who make you laugh constantly when standing there telling you, with exquisite inflections you about the horrors of her day. It has to take a lifetime of constant practice to hone the level of toss off humor Alissa Nutting presents in this book.
The boiling narrator, as many of the women in the book do, wants to be romantic about things, such as imagining they are boiling in a vat of tears, but life most often prevents it before many words in any given sentence attach the mistaken hope. And if the characters manage romance, it’s usually completely ridiculous. In this story, though the man next to her isn’t her type, she decides to make the best of it and tells him she loves him, which leads to minutes of romance before they are all removed from the gruesome pot one by one, as one of them calls out a long list of names which gives them all something to think about.
Most stories are longer, with involved plots full of bizarre twists and startling characters, such as “The Model’s Assistant” with a beautiful, nonplussed woman named Garla, who answers “Vodka” to many questions and equally hard to interpret phrases to others. Again, the narrator makes the best of a tough situation, to find unlikely companionship. The longing of the characters in these stories is touching and does make them lovable in spite of how far fetched their actions are. This ungainly narrator ingratiates herself to the model and says “We all must be fourth grade sandwiches to Garla.”
Characters host organism within their bodies, get intimate with garden gnomes, get racy with the devil, play animals in a cheesy children’s show, smoke the hair of the embalmed, and oh so much more. Some of the stories are so cringingly vivid and just keep going in their alternate reality, they become permanent parts of you, like absorbable sutures.
One of those is “Porn Star” which begins “I’m expected to have anal sex with the winning contestant on the moon. I work on an Adult Network reality show called Eat It, where male contestants eat all they can of a given substance in order to win some level of fornication with the program’s hostesses.” As you can imagine, this, like “The Model’s Assistant,” is one of the many places where the black marks will show up in the copies censored for vomit scenes.
“Band Leader’s Girlfriend” is another of those stories that will absorb into the wounds it makes in you as you laugh your outer layer off painfully. The drugged out couple base their religion on things Worm. “The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.”
The most impressive of those is “Delivery Woman,” with another character who finds what love she can convince herself is there in an absurd situation, bonding with someone who shares the same title as herself—independent space cargo transporter whose entire conversation with her is pornographic. Their changing relationship to her mother’s newly unfrozen body is one of the most spectacular twists I’ve experience in literature.
Alissa Nutting received her MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she edited their Black Warrior Review. She was awarded Cobain and Schaeffer Fellowships for Fiction. She is managing editor of Fairy Tale Review as well as fiction editor for Witness.
The book is beautiful visually too, with luminous and appropriately bizarre glossy cover art with sickly dark circles under the eyes, by Catrin Welz-Stein." - Tantra Bensko

"I honestly don’t know why novels get all the attention. They may have size on their side, but the truth is, writing effective short stories takes just as much craft as writing War and Peace. And some story ideas are so potent, so deliciously high-concept that they’re best enjoyed in small, intense bursts.
Here’s an excellent new example: Alissa Nutting’s first book, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (Starcherone Books, $18). Her short stories range in length from two pages to two dozen, but Nutting’s writing is so smart and original, I feel like I got a novel’s worth of ideas and emotions with each serving. Nutting begins with a clever premise—often darkly comic—and fashions stories that are funny, endearing and frequently bittersweet. In “Hellion,” a woman kills her husband, goes to Hell and hooks up with the Devil. Of course, Nutting’s version of Hell features non-alcoholic beer (real beer—as the Devil points out—would dehydrate everyone), and when a man hits on a woman, her breasts squirt an acid-like substance. Suffice to say their romance is awkwardly charming.
“Dinner” features five men and a female narrator, simmering inside a boiling kettle filled with garlic and assorted herbs. Despite being bound and awaiting a grim fate, she tries to connect with the others emotionally.
In “Deliverywoman,” an “independent outer space cargo transporter” rescues her cryogenically frozen mother, with devastating results. A suburban wife replaces her inattentive husband with an erotically charged garden gnome in “Gardener.” In “She-Male,” a transsexual with a taste for Sea Breeze cocktails enjoys a happy life with her boyfriend, a professional bowler, until her past catches up with her.
Some of Nutting’s narrators are innocents, others are perpetrators; some are naïve, some are world-weary, and some have committed homicide. A handful of these stories read like cautionary fairy tales, while others seem steeped in science-fiction tradition. All but three were previously published in literary journals, but these stories belong together. It’s no mistake that the collection was chosen by Ben Marcus (The Age of Wire and String, 1995) for Starcherone’s Innovative Fiction Prize.
Have you ever enjoyed a book so much that when it was over, you felt like you’d broken up with the author? I felt a little like that after reading Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls.
On the bright side, Nutting is young and surely has many more books to write. It’s too early in Nutting’s literary career to pigeonhole her as a short story writer—she’s pursuing her Ph.D. at UNLV, where she’s a recipient of the Schaeffer and Cobain Fellowships—either way, she’s clearly a talent worth watching." - M. Scott Krause

"One of the blurbs for Alissa Nutting's debut collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, describes her voice as "the futuristic love child of Mary Shelley and the Brothers Grimm." Add George Saunders to that threesome—hell, why not make it an orgy?—and you'll have a sense of the sheer imaginativeness of Nutting's stories.
Her settings are places of dark wonder, worlds where humans are forced to host at least one other organism in their bodies, where people are slow-cooked in kettles, where porn is shot on the moon, and where Hell is fathered by a timid and sensitive Devil. It's no coincidence that many of these worlds are the stuff of our worst nightmares. They're each an exaggeration of a specific modern malaise, yet the raw emotionality in these pages transcends satire.
Nutting's narrators—all female, all first person—use alcohol, drugs, sexuality, denial, and animals (yes, animals) to defend themselves against the ills of their worlds and against their own marginalization. They protest their vulnerability in voices almost shrill, until they crack. And these moments, when Nutting's characters open up and expose themselves as women with all too human wants and sorrows, are what make her stories so memorable.
Each story is a job description of a sort, though not the kind HR departments volunteer. From "Knife Thrower" to "Ice Melter," from "Teenager" to "Cat Owner," Nutting hones in on the way jobs and gender roles define women, and on the absurdity of those definitions. Professionally unsatisfied, Nutting's women and girls seek love in the most familiar and most unlikely places. Take, for instance, the lovely final lines of "Corpse Smoker": "So we kiss, and the weird smells of the morgue suddenly turn into something tame and slippery, something our lungs can slide over like jelly, something that can hold our hearts steady through our own quiet death-rattle." These stories are all death-rattles in a sense, quiet protestations against a fast-approaching demise; records that we haven't always been what we've become.
All of this (especially the death-rattle stuff) seems to suggest that Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a relentlessly dark and serious book, but that's not the case. Humor runs rampant in these pages. It's what keeps them from becoming too Grimm. Nutting may allow her narrators self-pity, but they're never allowed to be unfunny. Her prose resists pretension. Her similes and metaphors are always quirky, often deviant; they take a delicious minute to unfold and transport the reader.
For all the pleasure to be found in Nutting's inventiveness, in some instances the stories' premises eclipsed the characters themselves. While Nutting closes each story with lines that make a reader's heart go all big and leaky, there wasn't always (especially in her short shorts) an emotional spine supporting the surface eccentricity. In moments, the fantastical veered from inspired to random, and the prose read a bit like being told a spouse's dream pre-coffee (Thor is in Hell, but he keeps eating people's brains, so he's turned into a rhesus monkey without a brain, but then the Devil relents and gives him a mini-brain and puts him in charge of the new rollercoaster in Hell). This is a minor quibble—all in all Alissa Nutting's dreams are a pretty awesome place to find yourself.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls was chosen by Ben Marcus for the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. Alissa Nutting has also published work in Tin House, Fence, BOMB, the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, as well as many other journals. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was editor of Black Warrior Review. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an editor at both Witness and Fairy Tale Review." —Lydia Fitzpatrick

„I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.
From these very first sentences of “Dinner,” the opening story in Alissa Nutting’s debut short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, the reader knows he or she is in for something completely different and quite remarkable. Winner of the Sixth Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the collection is daring and wildly imaginative, full of fantastical and sometimes macabre situations that are at once funny, touching, and sometimes quite sad.
Nutting, always writing from the first person, takes the reader to some exotic places: if she is not boiling in a pot, she might be a reality-TV porn star on the moon, or being consumed by ants from within: in hell having an affair with the devil himself, or contemplating motherhood while performing in a mouse costume; having an online romance and delivering intergalactic cargo, or exorcising her mother’s ghost from the attic. The sheer creativity is stunning, and had it not been done well, might well have been alienating rather than engaging. Even in the most outrageous of situations, the reader is drawn in by the confidence of Nutting’s descriptions, and by the humor and warmth with which she inhabits her characters.
By power of the unconventional settings and circumstances alone, these stories are very memorable. Yet some of my favorites were those that were a little more of our own world. One of these was “Model’s Assistant”, in which a young woman, drunk at a party, is rescued by the charismatic yet incomprehensible model, Garla. Garla, at her whim, summons the narrator by an irresistible jewel-encrusted cell phone. It is a flawed and unhealthy relationship, one which our narrator craves and resents at the same time:
…I check my purse to make sure I still have it: the Garla phone, the jewel…. Glistening in my lap it is too beautiful to be trusted… I have the urge to leave the phone behind on the seat for someone else to find and answer, but I won’t. Instead I’ll go home and wait for her to call me …and this time I won’t forget to be grateful.
I also especially enjoyed the short yet very comical and sweet “Zookeeper”, in which a young employee steals a panda, and the rather poignant “Teenager”, in which a young woman makes choices about her pregnancy that lead to the end of her relationship:
…I snap my phone shut. My phone is a tightly shut clam and all the badness that happened inside is going to irritate itself into a pearl… My phone vibrates again and again, filling, no doubt, with venomous messages I will never listen to, but the thought of never hearing them somehow makes me sad…and this oily kind of sweetness starts to crawl up my throat and then melt back down again over and over, like something I ate long ago but am just now tasting.
I was impressed by Nutting’s gutsy writing and consistent, unifying voice throughout the collection. Due to their novelty and some of the subject matter, the stories can be rather intense. I appreciated them most when I read just a few at a sitting, with plenty of time for digesting in-between. The author does not shy away from anything in her work – including sex (lots of it), violence and death, so this collection will not be for all readers. I found Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls to be very striking overall, and am absolutely convinced that Nutting is a writer to keep an eye on – recommended for the most adventurous readers and appreciators of short fiction.“ – Jennifer M. Kaufman


"Porn star. Bandleader’s girlfriend. Deliverywoman. Cat owner. Alcoholic. Dancing rat. Magician. These are a random selection of the Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls in Alissa Nutting’s collection of short stories. Don’t be fooled—even the ones that sound normal aren’t.
Take “Deliverywoman.” The narrator of this story would have a fairly normal day job, though she is notably an intergalactic deliverywoman. With some time to kill between stops, she pops into a rather unusual event: “Justice Freeze, a cryogenic contractor largely employed by the government’s penal system, is going belly-up and holding a large auction. Several criminals whose permacapsules are programmed to not unlock for centuries are up on the aution block.”
One of those permacapsules houses the deliverywoman’s mother, a homicidal maniac who killed the deliverywoman’s father and has 414 years left on her sentence. CargoBabe (our narrator’s online chat handle) is able to get her for a good price and, hoping for “a healing experience,” loads her onto the ship and continues her way around the galaxy.
Or, she would, if not for the suggestion of her online boyfriend, FluidTransfer69. CargoBabe has not been what you would call lucky in love, and FluidTransfer69 is the first interested party in a while. Their relationship consists of bland chitchat followed by some pretty one-sided dirty talk. That’s probably not right—I’m sure CargoBabe participates; she just doesn’t really care. In any case, FluidTransfer69 knows how to unlock a permacapsule, which seems about as tough as jailbreaking an iPhone. Before you can say “bad idea,” CargoBabe’s mother is out, about, and insane. Her first words on realizing her rescuer is her daughter are, “Jesus, you turned out homely. Let me see your rack.”
Within 24 hours CargoBabe knows she needs to get away, and marrying FluidTransfer69 seems like the best way. But as she’s about to make her escape she finds herself stabbed in the chest. It’s her mother who will be picked up by CargoBabe’s boyfriend—in reality an ex-con who engineered everything, from online sex chat relationship to CargoBabe’s stop at the auction to her mom’s ultimate freedom.
So this is CargoBabe’s real delivery, and it certainly seems even less clean than whatever space junk she’s used to transporting around. Deliverywoman is her day job, her identity (CargoBabe), and her destiny. She chooses some of those aspects, and another is chosen for her. While the jobs and identities, along with the mechanisms Nutting uses to create them, vary, this general pattern operates throughout the collection.
That takes care of the unclean, and the jobs, so what we have left are the women and girls. The stories are clearly not focused on traditional conceptions of femininity (or are they—are porn stars not traditional?), but the narrators have familiar qualities and concerns, and receive familiar treatment, that we can recognize as women-and-girls issues and problems. The deliverywoman is concerned with her love life and her mother; she is victimized by her mother and a man. In one of my favorite stories in the collection, “Bandleader’s Girlfriend,” in between the sex and drugs and rock and roll the narrator finds out her sister has breast cancer and feels an overwhelming need to help her, if not heal her. The “Dancing Rat” is worried about her and her boyfriend’s failure to conceive, and what his statements about “free sex” really mean. The “Teenager” gets an abortion—and her boyfriend stolen. And the “She-Man,” after escaping a life of prostitution, is exposed as a transsexual to her current boyfriend by her former pimp.
None of this, though, is what you would call depressing, and the women aren’t victims. Even the one who’s about to be eaten for dinner:
I am the only woman in the kettle, which strikes me as odd. I’m voluptuous and curvy; I can understand why someone would want to gobble me up. The men do not look so delicious.
Nutting is definitely a talented prose stylist; her writing is funny, moving, exact, and unobtrusive. The stories are almost surprisingly even. While some interested me less at first, that almost always changed by the time I reached the end of a given vignette.“ – nicole at www.bibliographing.com

"I’m a traditionalist when it comes to reading fiction, but sometimes I look for a kick. Years ago I began to pay attention to Starcherone Books’ prize winners when Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey wowed me out of complacency. Now I seek out innovative fiction publishers who really publish innovative fiction, and not some narrative prose poetry that didn’t cut it in the chapbook market: work that claims innovation by way of sentence structure.
What I mean is, when I look for innovation in fiction I want fiction, real fiction. As I say to my students straight out: It’s all about the story, stupid.
Well, don’t tell that to Alissa Nutting. She’s got “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. I’ve got my work cut out for me trying to describe what you’ll get out of this collection: imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.
The stories in the collection live up to their title: women and girls hold jobs that definitely qualify as unclean. One is the boiled dinner for an obscure cannibalistic club, another is a porn starlet reality show host for an episode featuring anal sex on the moon, another is a child-actress-from-hell’s “adult zombie slave” television show sidekick. Each story catapults the reader into the wicked world of Nutting’s witty imagination, from a hell in which every damned frequents the same small bar that serves only non-alcoholic beer, to one where celebrities and rich people agree to turn their bodies into host environments for endangered species.
Yet, in spite of the sometimes impressionistic, sometimes realist, sometimes naïve-painting-inspired settings, the characters remain painfully familiar: a sister attempting to save her paraplegic brother from terminal depression, a transsexual attempting to hide her past from her boyfriend and from KKK bigots, a daughter trying to reconcile to her abusive mother, women coming to terms with infertility or with fatal diseases—and girls and women just trying to connect emotionally to the people in their lives.
I would abstain from labeling Nutting’s collection “women’s fiction” if it didn’t treat so heavily on the grotesque importance assigned to a woman’s beauty, and on the paradoxical conflicts and stupidities that such unreasonable demands create.
In “Model’s Assistant” for example, a party nerd is granted access to an elite night-clubbing society through her improbable friendship with a supermodel. The protagonist confesses, “Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.”
The party nerd’s life improvement reflects in the leftover attention that she can scrape from the model’s groupie followers. And when that friendship is threatened, the odd, unintelligible language the supermodel speaks takes an ominous turn: “Put you in tiny coffin,” says the supermodel when “breaking up” with the assistant, a poignant and telling variation from her earlier catch-phrase, “Special coffin.” The fact that Garla speaks no English and can only utter catch phrases that don’t always make sense (”Vodka, you know?”) is of no concern to the beautiful people who worship her.
In “Porn Star,” “Ant Colony,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” the situation is reversed: women are trapped by their beauty and sexual drive, and are reduced and victimized by evil surgeons, cold-blooded Idol-style audiences and shrewish sisters with terminal cancer whose jealousy grows to appalling proportions. The beautiful protagonists of these stories are only partially aware of the potential dangers of the envy they attract: “I was very used to people feeling like they were more important then me, but less beautiful,” says the heroine of “Ant Colony.” “I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.”
Similarly, in “Band Leader’s Girlfriend,” the flighty Claudia/Sorcerella has trouble shaking off an overbearing sister who makes it a habit to call her and hang up on her, or call her and shout. “I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor,” ponders the overwhelmed narrator.
Nutting is especially brilliant when revealing the dysfunctional layers of her characters’ otherwise glib and (mostly) carefree lives. The transsexual narrator in “She Man” reveals that a dog-murdering pimp is blackmailing her, this after a cheerful description of a perfectly ordinary and satisfying life as “queen of kitsch.” The relationship between the narrator of “Deliverywoman” and her online buddy, FluidTransfer69, echoes the usual she said/he said disconnection of casual cybersex partners that happens when one takes the other more seriously than the situation warrants. But this otherwise common scenario takes a turn for the morbid when the narrator reveals that her mother, convicted for murdering her father, was preserved cryogenically and her body is up for sale on a futuristic e-Bay style auction house.
Unclean Jobs harnesses this type of Jerry Springer drama to bring humor and postmodern insights to these action-packed short stories. You can spend the time chuckling as you turn the page, or you can ponder the prophetic vision of the near future that this collection delivers. Either way, reading Alissa Nutting’s fiction more than satisfies.“ – Laura Valeri

"As a writer currently living in Las Vegas, one might expect a book of this title to be nonfiction about some of Nevada’s more notorious industries. But it is not. In fact, Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a critically acclaimed collection of short fiction that is as fascinating as it is imaginative. With the release of her first book-length work, Nutting proves beyond a doubt that is a master of creating her own literary reality, and doing so in remarkable style.
Nutting calls her style “existential fabulism.” Although it is beautifully written, the settings and plots are at times wholly unrecognizable. They can be imaginative, so much so that it is hard to determine her inspiration and mindset without a degree of imagination as well. So, imagine that she wrote it while on a train ride from her native Michigan to her current home in Las Vegas.
While on the train, she was seated next to a young, sickly girl, who, to cope with her nausea, played with and chewed on her hair. As the train rounded the mountains across the American Midwest, the young girl would vomit uncontrollably into the provided sick bags. As a way to thank her for the inspiration, Nutting made the unusual use of hair and vomiting the two pervasive literary references throughout her collection of stories. Some of her characters smoked the hair of the dead to feel their pasts, others use human hair to fertilize their dull love lives, the hair of others indicated how recently they had visited the dead, and nearly every story had someone vomiting or nearly as bad. Such was the impact of the lone young traveler on Alissa as she wrote her excellent collection a few seats away.
Other experiences aboard the train influenced her writing as well. A trip to the dining car during “lobster night” inspired her to write the opening story (“Dinner”), which is about a group of people bound and boiling in some sort of dinner broth. The girl in the seat behind her talking loudly into her cell phone about her important friends had Nutting write a story (“Model’s Assistant”) about the assistant to a hyper-self indulgent supermodel. The mannish woman with a bowling bag for luggage helped her to dream up the story (“She-Man”) of Ginno the professional bowler and his love life. The lonely girl with the courier bag who never looked up from her computer resulted in her story about an intergalactic delivery girl engaged in an online romance while on a quest to free her criminal mother. The bratty girl continually saying nasty things about her caretaker’s weight and station in life forced her to come up with a story (“Dancing Rat”) that could explain such a tortuous relationship. By the time she finished the pieces, just as the train pulled into the Las Vegas valley, it was clear what connected her stories, and more importantly, it was clear what she would title her work.
The book won the 6th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, a classification that does not begin to justly describe her work. The stories detailed above, and many others throughout, are all influenced in varying degrees by what one might call unearthly reality. For instance, here is a somewhat typical section of her innovative fiction from the book, specifically from a story called “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” (page 43):
“My enlightenment is sparkling pink water and Sister is a levee, but CT allows me to rise up and overwhelm her walls. Sister has never experienced the unrestricted passion of one as enlightened to the Worm as CT is. She has no idea what to do with such love; it’s like giving a can of food to forest-people who can’t understand its monetary value, or the delicious pleasure that awaits them inside.”
Or this opening paragraph from the appropriately titled story, “Ant Colony” (page 69):
“When space on earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies. Many people chose something noninvasive, such as barnacles or wig-boles. Some women had breast operations that allowed them to accommodate small aquatic life within implants. But because I was already perfectly-breasted (and, admittedly, vain) I sought out a doctor who, for several thousands of dollars, drilled holes into my bones to make room for an ant colony.”
It is the first half of the book that will require the greatest investment from readers of traditional, more conventional fiction. The settings and plots can be so deranged at times that they are uncomfortable, a reader response Nutting was no doubt aiming for. These stories are complex, unusual at times, and often require as much imagination to read them as it took to write them. But they are also extremely competently written, focused, and unveiled, making for a hearty payoff.
The second half (or so) of the book is clearly set more in line with an earthly reality, however it is no less innovative. Instead of breaking down the laws of fiction, or challenging the space/time continuum, though, she challenges typical descriptions of characters, scenes, and setting. Her characters could exist and so could the problems and tensions of their lives, but they clearly exist outside of the white-picket-fences of the American Dream. Or at the very least, they make up the darkest secrets of the same.
Beyond being brought to Nevada on that fateful and imaginary train ride, there are only mild connections to the state offered up by this book. The story “Bandleader’s Girlfriend,” excerpted above, takes place in part on a Las Vegas balcony and at the Reno airport. Although Nutting is a Nevada resident, an editor at Witness, one of Nevada’s few literary magazines, this meager overlap is perhaps not enough for those who are interested in fiction and literature set in the Silver State. It is certainly too meager of an offering for those who wish to see Nutting’s considerable creative talent interpreting and re-imagining the state for the newest generation of readers and writers.“ – The Nevada Review

Alissa Nutting: As Much A Living Person


The Rumpus Interview

Juliana Paslay interviews Alissa Nutting

The Story Prize Interview

Alissa Nutting's webpage







Alissa Nutting, Tampa, Ecco, 2013.

In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.

Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.

Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.


Alissa Nutting’s first book, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, presented an impressive range of voices, from space-age pornstars to witchy cannibals to corpse-smokers and amputees. Somehow she was able to make any situation—no matter how fucked—seem feasible and hilarious. The expectation for her next book, then, was exceptionally high.
Her new novel, Tampa, just released from Ecco, takes that innate ability to its furthest possible extent. From the first sentence, Tampa promises it won’t be prone to blushing: “I spent the night before my first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation on my side of the mattress, never falling asleep.” Essentially a portrait of perhaps major-house fiction’s first female pedophile, Tampa presents Celeste, an eighth-grade teacher who is obsessed with fucking young boys.
The trick of the novel is how deftly Nutting makes this would-be female monster into a voice you can’t put down. The insane sex-scenes and rising tension of the ongoing taboo is tempered by Celeste’s sense of humor, her lack of inhibition, and Nutting’s ability to bury any alarm ringing in the reader with bizarre and unflinching sentences like: “I pictured us, airborne and naked in the backseat of the falling car, trying desperately to crawl toward one another against the forces of gravity so he could stuff his penis inside me for just one moment before death.”
Less language-heavy than Lolita, more suburban than American Psycho, Tampa is for certain a book that forces the reader to sit up and recalibrate the shape of their beliefs, while at the same time confronting all sorts of questions about predators, gender, perspective, and the taboo.
Alissa was kind enough to answer a few questions via email regarding some of Tampa’s takes on these ideas.

VICE: At what point did you realize you were going to write a novel about a female pedophile?
Alissa: From the book's inception I knew I wanted to write a novel specifically about the phenomenon of female teachers sleeping with underage male students. But the decision to write the book in first-person definitely came from a broader awareness that there aren't very many novels written from the perspective of a female sexual predator.
I was really impressed with how fluid and honest the voice of the narrator seemed. Was it easy for you to find a way into her voice, and to keep going deeper into the brain of the character as you continued?
I do think there's an advantage to writing about characters who have an obsession, because you always have their monomania to guide the voice, like a compass—no matter what she's doing, this novel's protagonist, Celeste, is always thinking about sex with young teen boys on some level, and part of the intrigue of the book is the reader getting to contrast the normalcy everyone around her assumes about her character with what Celeste is actually thinking.
Do you have empathy for Celeste? Is empathy important when writing this kind of book?
That's a great question. My empathy for her is restricted, I suppose, because she herself has no concern or empathy for others. But there are aspects of her character I can relate to, like being afraid of growing old. I did feel it was important that she be very interesting, since this isn't a book you keep reading because you deeply care about the main character as a person. Here you're reading because you're watching the train wreck of her choices unfold, or you're being entertained by her contemptuous making-fun of nearly everyone around her, or you're shocked by the situational irony of her thoughts.
It's complicated, I think, because Celeste's voice—even though everything she's describing is morally broken—has a humor to it. During the sex scenes I would sometimes almost forget this was an interaction between an adult and a child, I think because Celeste's sex drive is so insane at times, and your descriptions are so unashamed—even at times hilarious. I wonder if you'd say a bit about your approach to writing the sex scenes, if there were any rules you set for yourself—things you knew you wanted to make happen—and if it was difficult for you or if you felt removed from it?
I definitely felt that her character had to be really funny, so that there would be this disturbing pull of tension—on one hand at times you almost want to like her because she's making you laugh, but then there's the troubling context of her desires and actions that it's set against. The sex scenes were tricky. With the boys, I had to show her extreme, hyperbolic lust and her very adult approach to these interactions: she was completely turned on, which I had to reflect. But I also needed to reveal the impact and range of consequences of her behavior—how it was dishonest, damaging, frightening, or frustrating even as the boys were welcoming it. What I knew I wanted to make happen there was to display the lack of balance in regards to power, how unequal the playing field was; she’s an intelligent, manipulative, sexually experienced adult. And of course her sex scenes with grown men in the book are the least sexy thing in the world—they're atrocities she suffers through, though she does have a sense of humor about it.
It's interesting that early reviews keep comparing the book to American Psycho; the main link I see there is the narrators’ shared awareness that what they're doing is super fucked up, but they still do it, and get off on it, like pleasure is more real than law. I know Ellis was kind of acting out against a world he lived in that was full of drugs and blank people, and I wonder if there's something particular you were pushing against, whether it be the low number of female antagonists who are truly fucked up as compared to males, or a general sense in America of both demonizing and fetishizing these kinds of figures?
The book is definitely a response to each of those things, as well as to this cultural sense that physical attractiveness—much like wealth—is a form of immunity. That if you're beautiful enough the rules won't apply. In that vein, I feel like Celeste is this Frankenstein monster of male desire. She’s gorgeous and only thinks about sex: exactly what popular culture seems to state is every man’s ideal. She’s like if Maxim magazine made a wish but didn’t specify the parameters enough—“give us a perfect 10 nymphomaniac.” Well, like the proverbial monkey’s paw, here she is. Ta-da! So in many ways the character is poking fun at that ridiculous ideal.
You became a mother shortly after this book was released. I wonder if you feel you'd have been able to write the book the same way now, after having had a child, or if the life change has otherwise complicated or altered your perspective. At what age would you let your child find this book?
I do think it would be more difficult to write the book right now in particular—in this postnatal period where I'm awash with warmly fuzzy tenderness hormones and most of the items in our house are made of fleece and patterned with cartoon monkeys. I had to channel these great reserves of callous, satirical narcissism to write Celeste's character, and that would be a much more difficult headspace for me to enter at present. The age I'd be OK with my own child reading the novel would just depend on her maturity level I think. It's a very adult book, after all, but the topic is certainly one I want to discuss with her long before. I think as a culture we tend to do a better job warning our children about predators when our kids are younger, before puberty. After puberty that conversation seems to stop happening a lot of times. It's normal, I think, for parents to be uncomfortable about their children's budding sexuality, and particularly about the fact that their child might develop a crush on an adult—it's something no parent wants to think about. But it's my opinion that not discussing the possibility that those feelings might surface and the reasons against acting on them make teenagers more vulnerable to predatory adults.

Do you believe humans are evil by nature?
Perhaps. Of course there are so many lovely people who do a pretty great job of battling the worst in themselves, as extreme or benign as their own personal worst may be. They strive to be kind and they win at it. But I've always been intrigued by books with characters who have dreadful urges they aren't at all interested in fighting against. This novel is one of them. - Interview by Blake Butler