and Baby and other Stories, and the essay collection, Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Green Mountain Review, The Cut, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Her novels have been translated in Germany, Argentina and Hungary. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana and has lived for over 30 years in Brooklyn.
[Writers Read: Paula Bomer (October 2012); The Page 69 Test: The Stalker]
At Electric Lit Bomer tagged seven "novels that inspired The Stalker and some new titles that are narrated from the point of view of a psychopath." One title on the list:
Tampa by Alyssa NuttingRead about another novel on the list.
Following Nutting’s excellent story collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, Tampa enters the mind of Celeste Price, who, like any good predator, has her image all figured out—she’s a middle school teacher married to a police officer! She’s in the perfect situation to fulfill her horrific desires and molest pubescent boys. I love that this book was banned in some bookstores for being too explicit. I love this kind of courage, the courage to offend. I love that Nutting embodies a self aware monster, with stunners like this peppered throughout the novel: “I just wallpapered my cervix with the name of a teenage boy.” I love nothing more than a very finely drawn villain. The ending is perfect in that it is not at all what one hopes for. Is it problematic because most abusers in this world are men? It’s fiction. Let it be. It’s brilliant.
Tampa is among Samantha Downing's six novels with unsavory narrators, Kiley Reid’s top five novels with incredible child caregivers, Amelia Gray's top ten dark books, Tiffany Gibert's ten erotic books hotter and better than Fifty Shades of Grey, and Kristi Steffen's top five titles told from the perspective of an extremely disturbed individual you would never want to meet.
--Marshal Zeringue
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