Alissa Nutting
Unclean Jobs for Women
and Girls - $18
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
Chosen by Ben Marcus as winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction
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
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
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 was born in rural Michigan. She received a BA degree from the University of Florida and an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she served as Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her writing has appeared 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 is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has received Cobain and Schaeffer Fellowships in Fiction. She is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.