Tampa Book Summary

In "Tampa," Alissa Nutting plunges readers into the provocative mind of Celeste, a seductive and rebellious middle school teacher with a dangerously obsessive interest in young boys. As she navigates desire and morality, her choices spiral into a web of deceit and thrill, highlighting the dark side of lust. Nutting challenges societal norms with unflinching audacity, leaving readers questioning the boundaries of obsession and taboo. The story is a haunting exploration of power, manipulation, and the complexities of erotic compulsion. Prepare for a gripping ride that blurs the lines between attraction and moral repulsion.

By Alissa Nutting

Published: 2014

""I was determined to cultivate a culture of intimacy, a kind of love where the boundaries between teacher and student blurred into a dance of desire and consequence.""

Book Review of Tampa

In Alissa Nutting’s 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 Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s 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 Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.

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"I was determined to cultivate a culture of intimacy, a kind of love where the boundaries between teacher and student blurred into a dance of desire and consequence."

Tampa

By Alissa Nutting