Tampa

In this sly and salacious work, Nutting forces us to take a long, unflinching look at a deeply disturbed mind, and more significantly, at societys often troubling relationship with female beauty. -San Francisco Chronicle In Alissa Nuttings 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 Celestes terms for a secret relationshipcar rides after dark, rendezvous at Jacks house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celestes 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 Psychoesque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nuttings Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.