Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting (Goodreads Author)

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 290 ratings · 71 reviews

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 parake...more 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.

Winner of the Sixth Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, Judged 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

"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(less)

Paperback, 188 pages

Published August 16th 2011 by Starcherone Books (first published October 1st 2010)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Great Short Short Books

104th out of 274 books — 58 voters

Diary of a Dieting Madhouse by Paige Singleton

So Say the Waiters book 1 by Justin Sirois

unknown books that could be great films

129th out of 164 books — 232 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 1,811)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Jan 26, 2012 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

Throughout the last two or three years I've been transitioning away from a steady diet of things like science, philosophy, history, and politics and into a swift and roaring stream of fiction. (For the time being I'll opt to bypass all yawn-inducing, eye-shuttering, public self-analysis about why and how this has been occuring and just accept these turning tides for what they are. 'Cause, ya know, life happens, man, and sometimes you just gotta enjoy the ride, dude. Bro. Kimosabe.) During this b...more Throughout the last two or three years I've been transitioning away from a steady diet of things like science, philosophy, history, and politics and into a swift and roaring stream of fiction. (For the time being I'll opt to bypass all yawn-inducing, eye-shuttering, public self-analysis about why and how this has been occuring and just accept these turning tides for what they are. 'Cause, ya know, life happens, man, and sometimes you just gotta enjoy the ride, dude. Bro. Kimosabe.) During this bookish transmigration I've had the pleasure and the good fortune to read a lot of very solid, if not revelatory novels and short story collections. They've tended to be very current publications. Many of them emerging from the same printing presses as one another. Many of them circulating the same literary circles, caught in webs of cross-promotional blurbing by authors of mutual respect and/or perched upon similar artistic vantage points and/or harboring similar literary sensibilities. Unclean Jobs For Women and Girls is such a book. The major switch-flipping that set my 'to-read' clicking finger into motion was the enticing nod (more like an epileptic seizure of affirmative head movements) of approval from the great ambassador/knight in shining armor of experimental fiction called 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."

Not only did he supply that fantastic blurb but he awarded the book the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, a title most haven't heard of, including yours truly, but the more important part is that the final two words ("Innovative Fiction") do not falsely advertise the contents behind the book's cover.

Sometimes I loathe comparisons to other authors (because so many seem lazy and cheap and uninformed) but there are two I thought of while reading this book: 1) Aimee Bender's wrist-slashing bedroom-sulking little sister. 2) The former conjoined twin of Ben Marcus who performed the separation with her feral gnashing of teeth. This is just to say that Aimee Bender, while able to dabble with the grotesque via misleadingly sunny build-ups, doesn't take it to the same heights many of the stories in this collection do. And while there's the aforementioned Ben Marcus connection, and a shared penchant for the surreal, the two authors have entirely different agendas, despite a common geneology. And both comparisons are meant to make clear that these stories are creepy and nearly black as pitch. The key word there being nearly since I also found just about every single one to be just as funny as it was disturbing.

One way to describe the effect this has is to think of these stories as taking cartoonish premises and making them frighteningly real. The story "Dinner" contains a prime example of this, in that its central premise is that the narrator is being boiled alive in a cauldron of soup with a few other people. It reminded me of these extremely creepy/funny/creepy renditions that I've seen floating around the internet of characters from The Simpsons if they were to take on real human features in addition to their cartoonish ones.

I don't really want to divulge much else about the specifics of these stories and mainly because a large part of what makes them so interesting are the premises themselves—not to diminish how well each premise is executed. They're not exactly the kinds of stories one can outline in a spoiler-free way, or simply hint at bits and pieces of without giving away the whole shebang. Suffice to say, this collection is well worth reading if you like your tales told through a series of highly innovative and sinister-yet-humane crescendos, which often reach a fever pitch that disorientingly blurs the line between the real and surreal.(less)

35 likes · like · see review

Mar 21, 2012 s.penkevich rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: innovative, short-story, bizarro, the_jn-m-reading_list

We all have jobs, and most of us would prefer better ones. If you don’t fall into this category, then I applaud you, but it is so easy to fall into dislike for anything that pries open sleep deprived eyes morning after morning and dumps you into bed exhausted to dream of all the living you would rather have been doing during your waking hours. Some of us, the lucky ones, get to pick our jobs, and sometimes we are pulled into the ones life deals us. Alissa Nutting’s wildly imaginative Unclean Job...more We all have jobs, and most of us would prefer better ones. If you don’t fall into this category, then I applaud you, but it is so easy to fall into dislike for anything that pries open sleep deprived eyes morning after morning and dumps you into bed exhausted to dream of all the living you would rather have been doing during your waking hours. Some of us, the lucky ones, get to pick our jobs, and sometimes we are pulled into the ones life deals us. Alissa Nutting’s wildly imaginative Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls explores these jobs that life hands us and is sure to brighten anyone’s outlook on their own jobs when juxtaposed to the zany collection she concocts. There are people being served as dinner, porn stars roped into fornication on the moon, a living ant colony, alcoholics, and even the role of a teenager that all are illuminated under Nutting’s insightful lens. Full of hilarious wit and creative charm, this cunning collection serves as a bestiary of humanity, exposing all our shortcomings and absurdities as we struggle to find our place in some cosmic joke.

According to her author blurb, Nutting received an MFA from the University of Alabama, and has certainly put this to good use. Reading these stories brings back memories of creative writing courses, and it is apparent she was the student that blew minds and brewed jealousy with each story she penned. We are lucky enough that she harnessed her teeming imagination onto the page, and skillfully wrangled together inspired words and phrases into these visionary stories for all to share. The strange and bizarre nature made me feel right at home after making the rounds through the works of Amelia Gray, whom I HIGHLY recommend (start with Am/PM, you will not be disappointed). Not only can Nutting write wonderfully, but the infusion of the black comedy makes this something you should not miss. Many of her observations on her misfit cast will cause you to laugh out loud. ‘She did a turn that was so beautiful and practiced and impossible but to Garla was something that accidentally slipped out of her like a tiny fart.’ The same can be said of Nutting’s writing.

Although the settings and events are outlandish and bizarre, the characters move through them casually and draw the reader into accepting it as normal. ‘I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots of colors.’ This acceptance, and often resignation, to their surroundings is used on a few levels. Initially, this allows one to look at it mockingly and laugh. However, each story tends to deliver an insightful message, often discussing issues that our universal to us, such as about our failings from trying to hard or our fears, beliefs, etc. It then sinks in that if these feelings are right at home in an absurd world, imagine how absurd they are in OUR lives, yet we keep on making the same mistakes and believing in our misconceptions of ourselves and others. This collection of stories focuses primarily on the base, animal instincts that lurk within us all, and through these stories we see just how pathetic and disgusting the human race can be. The story of the porn star, for example, is actually pretty easy going on the porn star and spends most of the time examining how disgusting the men who enjoy this are.

Through each story, we see people trying to be better than who they are, or looking for love (even with the Devil himself), looking for acceptance, and almost always being the source of their own demise (Unless in the case that if you have a cat that foams at the mouth and bites men, than maybe that is your demise). Yet, Nutting makes us laugh at these absurdities we all share by elevating them to a jocular farce. This collection is hilariously probing into all our hearts and souls, and was well served as a big bag of brain candy in between the workout of Ulysses. Oh, and did I mention Ben Marcus not only gave it his stamp of approval, but also awarded it the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction? If you are looking for something bizarre and deeply, darkly, funny, well this is the book for you.
4/5
(less)

29 likes · like · see review

May 08, 2013 Jenn(ifer) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: awesomely-weird, female-authors, own, read-in-2013, re-read, short-shorts, you-should-read-this

Aw man! See! This is why I don't tend to re-read books! Unless it's one of those books that was pretty much written to be re-read (Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest), it's probably better that I bask in the rosy glow of my first impressions. When I first read this collection of nutty short stories (sorry, had to), I was head over heels! It was love at first read!

Don't get me wrong, I still "really liked" it the second time around, but I no longer think of it as AMAZING. Sniff. I don't w...more

29 likes · like · see review

Feb 27, 2013 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: u-s-lit, obscure-but-cool

I, too, have an unclean job; as in “It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.” But that’s not what Alissa Nutting means. And it’s not what I mean either. This wonderfully imaginative work is not about employment. Instead, it’s about the many chambers of the human heart.

I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Check.

I’m expected to have anal sex with the winning contestant on the moon. Check.

I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Check.

"You are embarrassing yourself on a national l...more

8 likes · like · see review

Nov 23, 2012 Jenny rated it 2 of 5 stars

I had remembered the title of this as "Uncommon Jobs for Women and Girls" which is of course wrong. In many senses. The women who stuck out for me in these stories were often prostitutes or sex workers, which is hardly an uncommon job for a woman. It is, however, perhaps an unclean job.

What Nutting excels at is the quirky premise. The odd situations and scenarios she describes in these stories never fail to grab you, because you keep wondering "how did you think of this bizarre thing." The exam...more

1 like · like · see review

Oct 08, 2012 Siyi rated it 5 of 5 stars

I liked this book for reasons I'm not even sure. I am on exchange in France and had to draw out the reading of this book because every time I picked it up I felt bad that I was not practicing French. Nevertheless, when I got to the end of it I was sad it had ended, and the opportunity cost of how much French I was not absorbing was not enough to destroy the joy I felt from Nutting's stories. Probably, if anything, I love a writer with a brilliant imagination, which is why I love the fantasy genr...more

like · see review

Jan 12, 2011 Sabra Embury rated it 5 of 5 stars

I went to a Rumpus reading held in Chinatown this week, and nothing against Rumpus, but I felt like I had better things to do than sit through five people reading what seemed to be journal entries aloud; stories about lost love or strange lust read in the tone of Victorian sentimentality, at an event as modern as free porn on the internet.

As I sat in a corner, playing games on my phone, I thought about aliens and talking wildebeests, and how anything out of the ordinary would add life to the en...more I went to a Rumpus reading held in Chinatown this week, and nothing against Rumpus, but I felt like I had better things to do than sit through five people reading what seemed to be journal entries aloud; stories about lost love or strange lust read in the tone of Victorian sentimentality, at an event as modern as free porn on the internet.

As I sat in a corner, playing games on my phone, I thought about aliens and talking wildebeests, and how anything out of the ordinary would add life to the entire experience of the Chinatown soiree. Tentacles even, or an inter-dimensional cataclysm involving blueberry yogurt.

I started Unclean Jobs For Women and Girls the next day as part of my kick to explore more women writers for 2011. I finished it later that evening taking breaks between each brief story to let them set as individual pieces, as opposed to one larger story consisting as an array of precarious situations; this pacing was due to the storytelling's consistent voice, which provided the warm comfort of familiarity versus what another reader might perceive as monotony. I was more than satisfied with the final product.

The first story "Dinner" sets the tone with a pot of people being boiled alive as a stew to be served for the dining pleasure of what must be cannibals. The narrator is the lone woman tied and sitting among an array of men in variations of panic as their skin turns pink and sweat beads mixing with broth and various vegetables. Another story "Ant Colony" follows a vain model who volunteers to let a dentist drill holes in her bones to harbor an ant colony.

In "Deliverwoman" an intergalactic delivery person buys her frozen psychotic killer mother at an auction after she's been placed in cryogenic chamber as a four-decade penance for crimes. In "Gardener" a woman falls for a "statuesque" garden gnome after she observes his nightly vigor with braided milkmaids. In my favorite story "Hellion" a woman sparks a romantic relationship with the devil in hell and gives him tips for interior decorating the hot, stenchy underworld with a roller coaster called SKULLCRUSH.

With the never ending stress of politics, social drama, finances and the constant looming of things like responsibility and boredom, it's nice to be able to escape into written worlds so unfathomable and absurd, making Cynicism feel less like a defense and more like a result of taking oneself too seriously.

What works with keeping the absurdity from being too over the top is the mindset of the women in the stories being told. They're strong, smart, fragile, vulnerable, and taking each of their calamitous issues at hand with an air of nonchalant folly. The attitudes and scenarios in Unclean Jobs created by some seemingly gifted mutation of dark, sweet and uniquely original melodramas is profound in its accessibility.

I'm excited to see what else will come from Alissa Nuttig's mind in the coming years; whatever it is, I know it won't be so serious that it's a chore to read.

(less)

9 likes · like · see review

Aug 01, 2012 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories-are-your-friends

Before we go any further I should say that after swinging wildly from delight to huffiness to outright mockery and then on to feelings of intense gloopiness towards Alissa Nutting, I ended up liking her and her fashionably bonkers stories more than just a little bit. There were a lot of ups and downs. We may as well get the downs out of the way first.

Some of these stories are extremely silly. I know they cruise on the edge of zany surreal absurdist lahdidah, and that’s okay. But some of them are...more

17 likes · like · see review

Aug 30, 2011 Roz Ito rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Alissa Nutting is such a wildly gifted & inventive storyteller, it's hard not to keep popping down the tales in this collection one after the other like candy, like a bag of gumdrops that feel deceptively easy to chew but are actually laced with a powerful hallucinogenic substance that turns into an elixir of pithy insight at the last possible moment. I felt almost guilty about how much I was enjoying myself at times. Nutting's narrative style is rapid-fire, economical, and surreally recogni...more

like · see review

Jan 05, 2011 Ethel Rohan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Alissa Nutting's, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, is unlike any other story collection I've ever read. The first story, Dinner, moved me in a profound way. It was awful and brilliant and possibly life-changing. Because of this story, because of the other stories like it in this collection--bold, surreal, deeply compassionate, and highly imaginative--I might just write differently. I might just live differently.

Stories like "Dinner," "She-Man," and "Gardener" made me feel very human, very vulne...more

5 likes · like · see review

Jul 08, 2012 Ryan Bastian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

I was lucky enough to have taken two writing workshops taught by Alissa Nutting. She's a fantastic teacher and clearly brilliant, but I didn't realize the extent of her beautiful and quirky writing until I finished this collection of short stories. I'm amazed at her ability to step into any pair of shoes and believably pull off dark and hilarious tales from their intimate and personal narrations. Yet at the same time, each uniquely different story contains the original and charming voice of Ali...more

like · see review

Aug 03, 2012 Patricia Murphy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: stories

I wanted to read this book because so many of the stories were published in lit mags I admire. As I read each story I was thinking about the editors who chose them for publication. For example, it makes sense to me that Swink published "Porn Star" and Mid-American Review published "Model's Assistant," etc. I edit a lit mag, so I read short stories with an eye for what I would like to publish. This collection made me feel covetous. I would love to publish many of these stories (though I would lea...more

like · see review

Aug 26, 2012 Sandra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Alissa Nutting writing moves from the bizarre to the slightly-less-bizarre. The opening story in this collection, "Dinner", finds the narrator, along with others, being boiled alive to be eaten. "Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain." This isn't an attack on carnivorous habits, but a hysterical and weirdly poignant portrayal of what being truly and humanly naked might be. What do people say as...more

like · see review

Aug 31, 2012 Ticklish Owl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, short-stories, science-fiction, fantasy

I loved the writing in every one of these stories, but sometimes the subject matter wasn't a good match for me, hence the lower ratings. I'm including the first few sentences of each story in lieu of a summary, the spoiler tag is used to keep the review PG.

Dinner ★★★★★
I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.

Model's Assistant ★★★★★
My best friend...more

like · see review

Dec 31, 2012 Michelle Zuppa rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had the pleasure of reviewing this collection for the Mid-American Review when it first came out, noting there that it was the first book in a long time that I read in a single sitting. Its literary merits are formidable--Nutting has a brilliant, hilarious imagination, rendering the absurdities of our deepest desires with skill and compassion. This semester, I taught "Model's Assistant" in a lit/comp class and enjoyed the response of my young students, many of whom readily identified with the...more

like · see review

Apr 02, 2013 Downward rated it 3 of 5 stars

this short story collection is, overall, hit or miss. at its worst its meandering, with a focus on peculiarities of environment rather than emotion - but even that, the books worst, is worth reading for the creativity that goes into the world building and the details that pepper every sentence. at its best it initiates a familiar humanity in an obscure world, manipulating unique situations to mine hte depths of our real world reactions. it is often very funny, and the funny moments are often ver...more

like · see review

Nov 18, 2010 Rose rated it 3 of 5 stars

Short stories about, yes, unclean jobs for the ladies. kind of Miranda-July-y in awkward content. The best story is Model's Assistant, the one that got me sucked into the book enough to buy it. i also like whichever ones are about being a pornstar in space, and being a lonely trucker lady (in space). lots of raunchy sex, all told in the same voice, as though it's the mind of one, many faceted woman with many many surreal jobs. i wasn't as excited about the prose at the end as i was at the beginn...more

1 like · like · see review

Mar 18, 2011 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was funny and eminently readable. All the characters are either beautiful women exploited for their beauty or else ugly women abused for their ugliness. But there is more to it than that. This author's imagination spans the gamut from a Hell in which the devil is charmingly shy and builds rollercosters and bars with non-alcoholic beer for the damned, and where space delivery women can bid for convicts' cryogenically preserved bodies on E-Bay. It's all both fantastical and familiar. This is...more

1 like · like · see review

Dec 21, 2012 Tess rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book is a lot of shock and awe. The stories are basically an immediately jarring context + women having lousy sex + hilarious metaphors + an intense sense of loneliness + an attempt at a meaningful last line. I appreciate the creative situations she came up with and her humor (I did laugh a lot), but almost all of the characters are so underdeveloped they're basically placeholders. I didn't get the point of the mini stories like "Zookeeper" other than to show off the author's ability to com...more

like · see review

May 12, 2013 Cheryl Klein rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasies-and-magical-realism, fiction, indie-presses, story-collections

The stories in this collection are sharp, both in the sense of wit and harshness. The first, "Dinner," features people being boiled alive. A later story, "She-Man," follows an MTF former prostitute as she tries to live the straight life. Her pimp catches up with her and she tells him, "You'll kill me just as dead as a real woman. As dead as your wife or your mother or your sister." Then he does. And she confides, "Their mothers and sisters, of course, are alive."

And that's how injustice plays o...more

like · see review

Feb 07, 2012 jess rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, fiction, ladyish

I wanted to read this book for so long that I can't remember the original reason i wanted to read it but finally the stars aligned and I did. It's a collection of short stories about women with various "unclean jobs," including deliverywoman, porn star, cat owner, gardener, knife thrower, zookeeper, alcoholic, etc.
Alissa Nutting plays with how gender works, along with the messy violence, gross bodily functions, and the uglier sides of desire and lust. I am certain this author identifies as a fe...more I wanted to read this book for so long that I can't remember the original reason i wanted to read it but finally the stars aligned and I did. It's a collection of short stories about women with various "unclean jobs," including deliverywoman, porn star, cat owner, gardener, knife thrower, zookeeper, alcoholic, etc.
Alissa Nutting plays with how gender works, along with the messy violence, gross bodily functions, and the uglier sides of desire and lust. I am certain this author identifies as a feminist, if you know what I mean. The women in these stories are not in control of their agency, and the men are almost entirely exploitative, mean or misogynistic. There are a lot of funny moments. There is a lot to think about in these pages. Several stories explore fucked up relationships with moms, but most of the conflict is of the romantic man-woman variety. The characters and settings are quite strange: for example, a game show where the winner has anal sex on the moon with the main character, a porn star, or another story with an older woman who is desperately sexually attracted to the garden gnome who comes alive at night to express his virility.

There is explicit material in many of these stories - call it visceral or call it raunchy, whatever you prefer -it's a hallmark of a certain type of feminist fiction written in a sort of time by a certain type of person. I'm not trying to say that it feels very "third wave feminist," just that there are a lot of sexual encounters and sexual elements, among all kinds of woman, of all ages, but certainly not with other women.

I especially liked "Ant Colony." "When space on Earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies." A vain, beautiful actress has holes drilled into her bones to house a colony of ants. At first, it seems like a perfect solution, as she can't feel the ants and they aren't visible so they don't affect her work. "I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful.” She begins to sense them inside her, and then they begin to eat her from the inside out. The actress leaves her obligations and life behind to become “Eat, Walk, Lift, Chomp.” This story tapped into my long-standing obsession with bot flies, but it was creepier and sadder than any bot fly infestation I've ever thought about. So, there's something in that.

This book offers some interesting tropes to the world of quirky, dark humored, feminist fiction. Nutting gave me something beyond the same rehashed narratives and themes I've come to expect from that type of book. I was, however, colossally disappointed and grossed out by the single trans woman character in the unfortunately-titled "She-Man." The character fell flat and the plot was so predictable. The former prostitute trans woman goes stealth, gets a nice boyfriend with a decent job, a little dog and her own business that allows her to make money off her creativity. Her former pimp tells her boyfriend about her history. The dog gets killed, the boyfriend kicks her out, and then he tells a bunch of bigoted white supremacists that she's a man. The white supremacists beat her to death in an alley after she makes an impassioned plea for life, invoking their sisters, mothers, wives.

I literally cannot understand why this author can write so many interesting stories with unconventional narratives about women, but cannot think of any story involving a trans woman that isn't "exposed, rejected, killed." It is exhausting to me to think of how far we have come on this and yet, here we are, Alissa Nutting writing "She-Man" in the year 2011. At least she didn't try to tackle the subject of race amirite? Small favors.

And that's the crux of this collection for me. It's on point with a lot of feminist issues that define my political life (abortion, sexuality, money, careers, mothering, daughtering, caring for animals, morality, infection, disease, drugs, political guilt, porn, aging, etc) but it seems to fall short in the ways that it could have been exceptional and different. There was an opportunity here, and this book took the easy way out.

You could make excuses for it, like yes, it is fiction and it doesn't make some higher claim to be the perfect modern feminist fables. The fact is, I'm writing about this interesting book that was written in my lifetime by someone who is probably on the spectrum of my social/cultural/political community and I'm saying, this book should have been better than that and I'm not going to stop asking for something better. I just can't. (less)

6 likes · like · see review

Mar 21, 2011 Dayna Ingram rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, weird-shit, strong-female-lead

I cannot find the words to adequately review this magnificent collection!

So here is a snippet from Nutting's interview over at the Rumpus:

Rumpus: What I love about your stories – one of many things I love – is that you write about the absurdity of contemporary popular culture without sacrificing compassion for your characters. I’m thinking of the story “Porn Star,” which is narrated by a porn star who’s expected to have anal sex on the moon for a reality TV show. In the wrong hands, this story...more I cannot find the words to adequately review this magnificent collection!

So here is a snippet from Nutting's interview over at the Rumpus:

Rumpus: What I love about your stories – one of many things I love – is that you write about the absurdity of contemporary popular culture without sacrificing compassion for your characters. I’m thinking of the story “Porn Star,” which is narrated by a porn star who’s expected to have anal sex on the moon for a reality TV show. In the wrong hands, this story could be a didactic mess. But the final paragraphs are sad and haunting. Do you worry that folks (critic folk in particular) will miss the quiet tenderness beneath the wild plots?

Nutting: Luckily I’m on prescription drugs that prevent me from worrying about anything too much. But yes, I do…I think humor is like a shield that lets you get as close to the sad sad flame as possible—far closer, oftentimes, than drama. The stories are funny and many have absurdist premises, but that’s the (hopefully enjoyable) coating that makes the bitter pill go down a bit easier. All of the stories’ narrators experience pretty grave pain. I wanted the stickiness of emotional agency to be highlighted throughout.

So that pretty much sums up the tone and intentions of Nutting's stories. The other thing I love about these stories are that they are full of risks. How, as a writer, are you not taking risks when you start a story out with, "I am boiling in a large pot with five other people"? Nutting is not afraid to follow these absurd lines all the way through. She doesn't just set something up and abandon it; she dives in headfirst and lets it take her on a journey of discovery (it is often easy to forget that essential aspect of writing: discovery). But even with the risks, Nutting remains thoroughly in control; she is not in contention with her characters, or her plots or her themes or ideas. Her characters may say to her: "This is what I am doing." And she responds: "Okay, but this is how you're going to do it."

Risk. Control. Humor. Absurdity.

Win. (less)

2 likes · like · see review

May 07, 2012 Mandy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Jessi's pick for book club. While the stories were interesting and entertaining, I didn't find the humor in them that she did. I actually found the stories quite dark and sometimes disheartening. Some of them were diverting, like "Zookeeper" or "Gardener" but when you got to some like "Magician" or the one where she's an outer space trucker, I had a hard time relating to the narrators. We'll see what the other ladies have to say.

like · see review

May 20, 2011 Kevin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: funny-stuff, small-pressy-or-obscurish, weird-lit

This is a book filled with what I call "Holy Shit! moments." As in, you stop every page or so and say out loud, "Holy shit!" These are wonderfully weird stories that have a refreshingly desperate and humane heart underneath all the surreal turmoil. Also--I saw Alissa read from this book recently and it was mind-blowingly good. This book and this writer deserve all of the hoopla they're getting and more.

like · see review

May 17, 2013 Esherlock rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was AMAZING. It challenged me and I had fun at the same time. These short stories are at times experimental and uncommon. Nutting is not afraid of her intellect and not afraid you have some too. This book made me laugh so many times and I would end up reading long passages to my husband. I can't recommend it enough.

like · see review

Sep 01, 2011 Charlie Geoghegan-Clements rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-fiction

Absolutely brilliant. The stories in this book so wonderfully walk the line between hilarious and devastating. In the language of the everyday Alissa Nutting writes about groups of people being boiled alive in a giant pot, having anal sex on the moon, stealing a panda, and, well, even more. Her first lines are incredible: "I never had breasts until I went to Hell" is a particular favorite. I can't recommend this book enough.

like · see review

Nov 28, 2012 Erika rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fav

One of the best collection of short stories I have ever read. The best kind of science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction, or whatever you want to call that genre that leaves you simultaneously satisfied and uneasy. Suggested to me by an Elliott Bay Books employee.

like · see review

Jul 10, 2012 Karen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemp-catch-all

Probably more like a 3.5. These were very imaginative, very funny, and outrageously bizarre. The thing I liked about how bizarre they were was that they managed to be so in a fairly non-self-conscious way -- Nutting never gave off that feeling of trying to be bizarre for the sake of being shocking in any way. These were just the premises of stories that were almost always about very real, basic, human feelings -- longing and fairly desperate loneliness seemed to underlie the majority. Had they j...more

like · see review

Sep 06, 2012 Gabriel added it

Shelves: 2012

Hard to pick a favorite from among those first five, but somewhere in those first five is my favorite. Not to discount the rest of the collection, but, man, "Model's Assistant," "Porn Star," "Dinner," "Bandleader's Girlfriend"? Hard to do much better.

1 like · like · see review

Aug 09, 2011 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first half of this book I really disliked. The second half just blew by with a sick fascination. Was it the book or my mood? It was just amazing how many different horrible, bizarre scenarios a single author could come up with. On the back cover, a reviewer writes, "a human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames, to run themselves aground, to seek ruin on every occasion.” So true.

1 like · like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 60 61 next »

Horror

6 users

Horror > Bizarro Fiction

5 users

Literature

3 users

Fantasy

3 users

Contemporary

3 users

Book Club

3 users

Feminism

2 users

Anthologies

2 users

Adult Fiction

2 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by Alissa Nutting

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings

The Ecco Summer 2013 Fiction Sampler: Excerpts from Ecco and Amistad's Upcoming Books

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Unclean Jobs for ...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Unclean Jobs for Women...

“I was like a turd inside someone who'd accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.” — 1 person liked it

More quotes…

title link	preview: Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
avg rating	preview: Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Goodreads rating: 4.20 (290 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8603232-unclean-jobs-for-women-and-girls?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1314316154l/8603232.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8603232-unclean-jobs-for-women-and-girls?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting[/url]

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (4)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by Alissa Nutting

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Unclean Jobs for ...

Quotes from Unclean Jobs for Women...