“In this sly and salacious work, Nutting forces us to take a long, unflinching look at a deeply disturbed mind, and more significantly, at society’s often troubling relationship with female beauty.” -San Francisco Chronicle
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 is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. She is the author of the story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, as well as the novel Tampa.
The idea that readers can’t identify with unlikable characters is hilariously, fatally flawed. In pursuit of a good story, we’ve rooted for the success (or at least avidly followed the story) of psychopaths, rabbits, the color red, unapologetic pedophiles, and bees. If you stick googly eyes on a rock and give it a purpose (to kill all the other […]
With Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov dared readers to identify with a monstrous, unreliable narrator. Artistic prose and a strong narrative voice can wreak havoc with our emotions, startle us with darker-than-dark humor, or even force us to question the nature of the world around us. From a female Humbert living in modern-day Tampa to a socially […]
From A Clockwork Orange to Lolita, The Stranger to American Psycho, many of the most controversial, gripping novels of the last century are first-person narratives detailing the inner workings of disturbed minds. Our collective obsession with abnormal psychology has brought us entire cable stations devoted to true crime, a flood of television and movie procedurals […]
Back in June, we solicited summer reading recommendations from some literary peeps in the know. Now, a new slew of characters has come forward to offer their picks for the holiday gift-giving season. Here are the titles at the top of their lists: Tess Durbeyfield recommends Orange is the New Black. Tess loves this memoir by Piper Kerman for its balance of humor […]
You can tell there’s something a little seamy, lurid even, about Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, just from the cover. Not so much online, where the stark black & white image only vaguely evokes a chalkboard and the book’s high school setting. Pick up the physical object and you discover that the dust jacket is lined […]
