What I mean is, when I look for innovation in fiction I want fiction, real fiction. As I say to my students straight out: It’s all about the story, stupid.

Well, don’t tell that to Alissa Nutting. She’s got “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. I’ve got my work cut out for me trying to describe what you’ll get out of this collection: imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.

The stories in the collection live up to their title: women and girls hold jobs that definitely qualify as unclean. One is the boiled dinner for an obscure cannibalistic club, another is a porn starlet reality show host for an episode featuring anal sex on the moon, another is a child-actress-from-hell’s “adult zombie slave” television show sidekick. Each story catapults the reader into the wicked world of Nutting’s witty imagination, from a hell in which every damned frequents the same small bar that serves only non-alcoholic beer, to one where celebrities and rich people agree to turn their bodies into host environments for endangered species.

Yet, in spite of the sometimes impressionistic, sometimes realist, sometimes naïve-painting-inspired settings, the characters remain painfully familiar: a sister attempting to save her paraplegic brother from terminal depression, a transsexual attempting to hide her past from her boyfriend and from KKK bigots, a daughter trying to reconcile to her abusive mother, women coming to terms with infertility or with fatal diseases—and girls and women just trying to connect emotionally to the people in their lives.

I would abstain from labeling Nutting’s collection “women’s fiction” if it didn’t treat so heavily on the grotesque importance assigned to a woman’s beauty, and on the paradoxical conflicts and stupidities that such unreasonable demands create.

In “Model’s Assistant” for example, a party nerd is granted access to an elite night-clubbing society through her improbable friendship with a supermodel. The protagonist confesses, “Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.”

The party nerd’s life improvement reflects in the leftover attention that she can scrape from the model’s groupie followers. And when that friendship is threatened, the odd, unintelligible language the supermodel speaks takes an ominous turn: “Put you in tiny coffin,” says the supermodel when “breaking up” with the assistant, a poignant and telling variation from her earlier catch-phrase, “Special coffin.” The fact that Garla speaks no English and can only utter catch phrases that don’t always make sense (”Vodka, you know?”) is of no concern to the beautiful people who worship her.

In “Porn Star,” “Ant Colony,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” the situation is reversed: women are trapped by their beauty and sexual drive, and are reduced and victimized by evil surgeons, cold-blooded Idol-style audiences and shrewish sisters with terminal cancer whose jealousy grows to appalling proportions. The beautiful protagonists of these stories are only partially aware of the potential dangers of the envy they attract: “I was very used to people feeling like they were more important then me, but less beautiful,” says the heroine of “Ant Colony.” “I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.”

Similarly, in “Band Leader’s Girlfriend,” the flighty Claudia/Sorcerella has trouble shaking off an overbearing sister who makes it a habit to call her and hang up on her, or call her and shout. “I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor,” ponders the overwhelmed narrator.

Alissa Nutting / photo from the author's website

Nutting is especially brilliant when revealing the dysfunctional layers of her characters’ otherwise glib and (mostly) carefree lives. The transsexual narrator in “She Man” reveals that a dog-murdering pimp is blackmailing her, this after a cheerful description of a perfectly ordinary and satisfying life as “queen of kitsch.” The relationship between the narrator of “Deliverywoman” and her online buddy, FluidTransfer69, echoes the usual she said/he said disconnection of casual cybersex partners that happens when one takes the other more seriously than the situation warrants. But this otherwise common scenario takes a turn for the morbid when the narrator reveals that her mother, convicted for murdering her father, was preserved cryogenically and her body is up for sale on a futuristic e-Bay style auction house.

Unclean Jobs harnesses this type of Jerry Springer drama to bring humor and postmodern insights to these action-packed short stories. You can spend the time chuckling as you turn the page, or you can ponder the prophetic vision of the near future that this collection delivers. Either way, reading Alissa Nutting’s fiction more than satisfies.

Further Links and Resources

Alissa Nutting - photo from the author's website

The longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award has just come out, and here at FWR, we’re thrilled to have featured many of the writers on it in interviews, reviews, and essays, including:

• Anthony Doerr, for Memory Wall
• Danielle Evans, for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
• Siobhan Fallon, for You Know When the Men Are Gone
• Alan Heathcock, for Volt
• Valerie Laken, for Separate Kingdoms
• Yiyun Li, for Golden Boy, Emerald Girl

Offered by the Munster Literature Centre, the 35,000-euro prize is the largest for a short story collection.  The shortlist will be announced in July.  In the meantime, click through above to learn more about the authors on the longlist and select your favorites!

This year’s judge is Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The winner will receive $500 and publication in First Proof, BOMB’s literary supplement.

Full content details and submission instructions are here.

And to learn more about the journal, check out BOMB’s website, back issues, and blog.

Don’t know BOMB? We’re pleased to introduce you. A quarterly lit mag, BOMB Magazine was founded in 1981 and features interviews, original writing, and reviews.

Says the journal’s website:

BOMB was named after Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, a 1917 journal edited by artists and writers. Following in this tradition, BOMB’s editors are also all practitioners of the arts. BOMB was launched because its early editors saw a gap between the way art and literature were discussed and understood by those individuals outside the creative arts and those within the disciplines.

Full content details and submission instructions are here. And to learn more about the journal, check out BOMB’s website, back issues, and blog.

In 2007, to further its mission of fostering literary excellence, community involvement, and education, Dzanc Books created the Dzanc Prize, which provides monetary aid in the sum of $5,000, to a writer of literary fiction. All writers applying for the Dzanc Prize must have a work-in-progress they can submit for review, and present the judges with a Community Service Program they can facilitate somewhere in the United States. Such programs may include anything deemed “educational” in relation to writing. Examples would include: working with HIV patients to help them write their stories; doing a series of workshops at a drop-in youth homeless center; running writing programs in inner-city schools; or working with older citizens looking to write their memoirs. All community programs under the Dzanc Prize must run for a full year.

The submissions for the Dzanc Prize are reviewed by a panel consisting of Steve Gillis, Dan Wickett, Steven Seighman, and Keith Taylor.

Previous winners include Eugene Cross, Kodi Scheer, and Laura van den Berg. For full guidelines, see the Dzanc website.

Virginia Woolf, via Flickr

AROHO’s Orlando Prizes for unpublished poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and nonfiction celebrate Virginia Woolf’s title character’s liberation from the restraints of time and gender. AROHO’s new array of competitions is an invitation of women writers to manifest their own escapades “in gardens running down to the river, and a pleasant grove of nut trees to walk in.”

Award: $1000 and publication for the best unpublished work by a woman in each of four genres—Short Fiction, Flash Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Winning entries will receive print publication in the Los Angeles Review and AROHO’s website.
Deadline: 1/31/2011 for all genres. Fee: $15 per entry

AROHO is also featuring an August Retreat, with keynote speaker Marilynne Robinson, as well as a number of other wonderful women writers – Mary Gordon, Bhanu Kapil, and Kate Gale to name a few. Completing this triumverate of good things, an Artist in Residence Award for an artist who also takes an interest in writing to attend the Retreat for Women Writers.

Whatever projects you’re working on this weekend, may you be filled with inspiration and discipline.

Open to ALL writers. First place has gone to beginners with no previous publications and to accomplished, established writers. All are welcome. Word count range: 2,000 – 20,000. (Yes, a 2,000 word piece can compete against a 20,000 word piece—it’s the story that counts.)

First place wins $2,000 and publication in Issue 82 of Glimmer Train Stories. Second- and third-place winners receive $1,000/$600 (or if chosen for publication, $700).

The December contest closes on January 2, and the reading fee is $18. Full details here. As Heidi Durrow said in an interview with Mary Westbrook for FWR earlier this year, you have to get it out there: “I sent out my work to everyone. … For every rejection I received for a story, I sent the story out to two more journals. I spent a lot of money on postage, but finally, exponentially, I got some good news.” If you’ve got a particular story in your crosshairs for December, there are lots of great contests going on right now. Happy writing!

Last year’s fiction judge was Aimee Bender, who selected the winning entry, “All Galaxies Moving” by Marjorie Celona (which is included in the current issue of Crazyhorse No. 78, pictured here). Recent fiction prize judges have included Ann Patchett, Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Dan Chaon, T. M. McNally, Diana Abu-Jaber, Michael Martone, and Charles Baxter.

The winner of the prize will receive $2,000, and publication in Crazyhorse. The entry fee is $16, which includes a 2-issue year’s subscription to the magazine, and an electronic subscription. Ladies and gentlemen, start typing.

Yes, you read that right: the goal of the contest is to write a novel in just 3 days. (Nanowrimo ? Ha! We laugh at your extra 27 days!)

At The Millions, Sean Di Lizio explains:

The 3-Day Novel Contest is held annually in early September on the Canadian Labor Day long weekend. In 1977, a writer’s group in Vancouver accepted the challenge for the first time.

The contest has been running ever since. According to the organizers, the 3-Day Novel Contest has been called a “fad,” an “idle threat,” a “great way to overcome writers block,” and “a trial by deadline.” It opposes the notion that novels take eight years of angst to produce. Most entrants recognize that winning is secondary to finishing with a complete novella and no nervous breakdown.

Novels of any length and genre are allowed—and the winner, selected by a panel of judges, will be published by the imprint 3-Day Books. Official rules and registration info, as well as frequently asked questions, can be found on the contest’s website. But don’t delay if you want to participate: the 2010 contest runs September 4-6, and entries are due by September 10.

(It’s a 3-day novel—you didn’t need planning time, right?)

Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop have named Sunil Yapa as the winner of their 2010 short story contest. From the announcement:

Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop have selected the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest winner, Sunil Yapa, who penned “Pilgrims (What is Lost and You Cannot Regain)”, a poignant story of anguish and reconciliation.

Yapa is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City. His work has appeared in Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification and The Multicultural Review, and he has received scholarships to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. The son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in central Pennsylvania and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries.

Contest finalists included Viet Dinh for “Lucky Dragon,” Soma Mei Sheng Frazier for “Antique,” Marjan Kamali for “Tehran Party,” Stellar Kim for “Dissolution,” Tsering Lama for “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born,” Jenie Pak for “Something Out There,” JK Shushtari for “The Sweet Dry Fruit of the Lotus Tree,” Shilpi Suneja for “The Simpleton,” and Shruti Swamy for “Blindness.” Alexander Chee, Whiting Award–winning author of Edinburgh, and Jaed Coffin, author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, served as judges, and Fiction Writers Review was proud to serve as a media partner for the contest.

Yapa’s winning story will be published in the fall issue of Hyphen, on newstands in September. Until then, you can whet your appetite by reading the 2008 winning story, “Playing the Sheik,” by Shivani Manghnani, and the 2007 winning story, “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers,” by FWR contributor Preeta Samarasan.

Finally, you can read more about the contest and results on the AAWW website and the Hyphen website.