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3.0 

Tampa

By Alissa Nutting
Tampa by Alissa Nutting digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

“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.

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3884 Reviews

3.0
Red Angry Face“This book was disturbing, simply put. And not being able to place if it was disturbing for disturbing’s sake was even more unsettling. Nutting’s writing was compelling in a “I need to follow the depravity” way, but the main character was extremely hard to sympathize with; not that I’m looking to sympathize with a sexual deviant, but it would have been more compelling if Celeste was more insidiously calculated or, conversely, tortured. The ending felt convoluted and rushed, and made it so the reader didn’t have time to empathize with readers who truly deserve it. Decently written, a little gratuitous on the erotica, but fits well into the unreliable narrator/unhinged women narrators arc. If anything, it’s in the furthest end of the spectrum of those characters.”

About Alissa Nutting

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.

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