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Unclean Stories for Women and Girls
Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Ben Marcus
"Alissa Nutting builds a dark catalog of behavior for her characters and the result is a kind of human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames, to run themselves aground, to seek ruin on every occasion. These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved." Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women, a novel
"Like the futuristic love child of Mary Shelley and the Brothers Grimm, Alissa Nutting writes the most moving and uncanny prose. I want to be her avatar. Her future is great." Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, Bird
"These energizing, sparklingly imaginative, at time visionary stories — one about a woman who wants her mother stuffed and made pretty when she dies; others about mysterious metalogical creatures — form a necklace of deceptively childlike voices moving through an avant-gothic cosmos. But they are as much, if not more, about the beauties of surprising, rhythmic prose, as well, the syllabic stuff you can taste on the tongue." Lance Olsen, Final Judge, 5th Starcherone Fiction Prize
"Alissa Nutting's stunning debut collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, reanimates the deadest of dead pans to a state of enameled kabuki solar veneer — a sanctified, sublime, full-throated and full-throttled static panic. These fictions are panoplies of syntactic semantic seismic wonders. Don't look now but you are looking at a sun raised to a higher power, and it's not blinking." Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone
"Nutting's outrageous and excruciating writing makes my face split with laughter, often in public. She's glorious chaos and utterly original — read her with joy." Lydia Millet, author of Love in Infant Monkeys
Alissa Nutting