Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Ben Marcus. In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother's ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley. "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.
Synopsis
"[Alissa] Nutting's outrageous writing makes my face split with laughter....She's glorious chaos and utterly original." --Lydia Millet
Synopsis
"Nutting's outrageous writing makes my face split with laughter. . . . She's glorious chaos and utterly original."Lydia Millet
"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. . . . (They) illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved."Ben Marcus
Alissa Nuttings collection is reminiscent of George Saunders' or Aimee Benders earlier work where nothing is held back and anything goes.
Alissa Nutting is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.