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An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time
Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015.
Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.
"I can't recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I'm shocked and scandalized. She's brilliant, this young woman."—David Sedaris
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 17, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781501930881
- File size: 242564 KB
- Duration: 08:25:20
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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The disturbed, and disturbing, characters in these short stories are perfectly confident in their own normalcy. Narrators Alyssa Bresnahan and Richard Poe project that confidence with ease. Every story contains a twist that the narrators must maneuver to make the next bizarre moment sound not just natural but inevitable. For instance, in one story Poe plays a dad who, interrupted by his son's new girlfriend just as he is about to commit suicide, decides to pretend he is his son's lover--and then settles down with her to do drugs. Bresnahan is chilling as a girl who is fiercely certain that killing the local pedophile will simply and expediently transported her back to her "real" home. Bresnahan and Poe demonstrate their ease with their craft through the creation of these uneasy worldviews. K.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from September 5, 2016
In 14 expertly crafted stories, Moshfegh (Eileen) examines characters and situations too weird to be real and too real to be fiction, with themes of alienation, ennui, displacement, sexual neuroses, and addiction. A voyeuristic old man steels his courage to approach the beautiful, aloof woman working at the counter of the local arcade (“Mr. Wu”); an aspiring actor hooked on motivational clichés spins out of control in a breakup saga (“The Weirdos”); a high school English teacher has an on-again/off-again relationship with the drug-dealing “zombies at the bus depot” (“Slumming”); a grieving husband uncovers evidence of his dead wife’s infidelity and explores his own sexuality (“The Beach Boy”); an underachieving suitor embarks on a desperate quest for a cheap ottoman that holds the key to his quixotic romantic endeavors (“Dancing in the Moonlight”). There’s not a throw-away story in the collection. Each resonates with seemingly effortless, ineffable prose, rarely striking an inauthentic note—particularly memorable are the endings, which often land to devastating effect. The author’s acute insight focuses obsessively, uncomfortably, humorously on excreta, effluvia, and human foible, drilling to the core of her characters’ existential dilemmas. Moshfegh is a force.
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