Contest Press Release (with finalists, honorable mentions, etc.)

Press Release
Contact: Ted Pelton, Director, Starcherone Books, ted@starcherone.com, 716-885-2726


Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Chosen by Ben Marcus for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction


Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. She will receive $1,000 and publication during Starcerone’s 2010-11 season.

Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus. A total of 210 manuscripts were submitted for the prize.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for The Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Nutting’s manuscript was one of five finalists. The titles of these manuscripts were announced in July, while the names were held back to keep the judging blind. The other finalists, listed alphabetically, were:

• Roxanne M. Carter – Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
• Rich Ives – The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins to Leak
• Grace Krilanovich –The Orange Eats Creeps
• Levi Teal – 200 Pieces

Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories have been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

In awarding the prize, Ben Marcus had this to say about Nutting’s book:

“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.”

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work; most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger.

The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell. Mitchell's book, The Creepy Girl and Other Stories, is newly available from Starcherone Books.

There were also 5 manuscripts designated as honorable mentions in the 2009-10 contest:

• Rebbecca Brown – They Become Her
• Misha Hoekstra – The Joy of Edge Tools
• Mary Overton – The Gossip's Crime
• Brian Seabolt – The Alpha Privative
• Ron Tanner – Kiss Me, Stranger

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 210 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010. The judge of next year’s contest will be novelist Stacey Levine.

Winner!!!

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for the Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories hagve been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work: most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age. The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell.

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 209 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010.