Ottessa Moshfegh

The debut short story collection by the author of Eileen, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment, in very different ways, but each of them seems destined to be tripped up by their own baser impulses. What makes these stories so moving is the emotional balance that Moshfegh achieves - the way she exposes the limitless range of self-deception that human beings can employ while, at the same time, infusing the grotesque and outrageous with tenderness and compassion. 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 oddly and powerfully invigorating. Moshfegh has been compared to Flannery O'Connor, Jim Thompson, Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith but her voice and her mastery of language and tone are unique. One of the most gifted and exciting young writers in America, she shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

Homesick for Another World

Phoebe

He watched her look in her compact. He wondered what she thought when she looked in the mirror, if she knew her own beauty.

Around ten p.m. I'd switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me.

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.

Stories

Chloe Heisserer

emelia grace ilgner

armoni mayes

I would give this collection of short stories between a 4-4.5 stars. I heard about this book from a couple of different tik tok videos that described it as “grotesque” and “disturbing”, yet I kind of disagree with that notion. Yes the book has some darker themes to it but overall there was not a continuation of things that made me feel uncomfortable. I think if you are used to reading YA fiction or more romance novels I do believe these short stories could be disturbing for you. But if you are used to reading books meant to make you feel uncomfortable, this is a cake walk.

i'm all for nostalgia and familiarity but half of this book is filled with like... ugly cishet men yearning idk. not exactly the kind of creepy i'm into.

shamira

azliana aziz

my level of expectation was set too high so i'm at fault here.

There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment, in very different ways, but each of them seems destined to be tripped up by their own baser impulses. What makes these stories so moving is the emotional balance that Moshfegh achieves - the way she exposes the limitless range of self-deception that human beings can employ while, at the same time, infusing the grotesque and outrageous with tenderness and compassion. 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 oddly and powerfully invigorating. One of the most gifted and exciting young writers in America, she shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

Syahla Aurel

And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.

Reading this book was a whole different experience. I was skeptical at first, but as the story progressed, it began to make more sense.

y✦

✦ love a good short story collection that reminds me of how laughably unbearable this world is 
✦ didn't hold back on the gross and ugly but i mean isnt that what life is? 
✦ i feel like we'd click

charisa

i have been meaning for forever to get around to reading moshfegh and now i have finally done it!! but uh wow the number of times i physically recoiled while reading through this collection? uncountable. her descriptions of the human body are just so… unceremoniously DISGUSTING sometimes, like man you were truly t r y i n g to make me lose my lunch. it’s different from k-ming chang in that there’s no veiled fantasy here, just bare bones and guts.

imagine someone observing life with absolutely ZERO sense of romance or sentimentality and you have moshfegh. at the same time, she has a talent for divulging such private, shameful details in the most straight-faced way possible. as a result, you’re forced to look at personal chronicles and interactions through an almost sociopathic lens. i both admire and despise it.

There's something unsettling about the stories in this book, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful. The 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. In this book, the grotesque and the outrageous are approached with tenderness and compassion. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful - but beauty comes from strange sources.--adapted from publisher's description.

enya

I LOVE U ottessa moshfegh and your unhinged little characters <3

Meghan Navoy

I thought this book was so darkly funny and chortled to myself in nearly every story. It's so fun to read short stories!! Ottessa is such an engaging and hilarious writer in the most subtle jabbing way, which I love.

Au lever du soleil, alors qu’elle promène son chien dans la forêt, Vesta tombe sur un message écrit à la main, délicatement maintenu au sol par quelques cailloux. « Elle s’appelait Magda. Personne ne saura jamais qui l’a tuée. Ce n’est pas moi. Voici son cadavre. » Autour d’elle, pas de tache de sang, pas d’écharpe abandonnée : nulle trace d’un crime. Vesta n’a bientôt plus qu’une obsession : résoudre ce mystère. Qui était Magda ? Que lui est-il arrivé ? Et qui l’a tuée ? Avec le peu d’indices dont elle dispose, Vesta dresse une liste des suspects et de leurs mobiles. À mesure que son enquête avance, les dissonances bizarres s’accumulent, peut-être liées aux zones d’ombre de son propre passé... Mélange singulier de polar et de comédie grinçante, le nouveau roman d’Ottessa Moshfegh met en scène une chasse au criminel enfiévrée où l’on ne sait bientôt plus très bien qui est le chasseur et qui est la proie, et livre une œuvre magistrale sur les écueils de la solitude.

roman

La mort entre ses mains

Raphaëlle

To be transparent, I was a bit repulsed when I first started reading this. And then slowly, gradually, like a frog eased into lukewarm to boiling water, I became accustomed to Moshfegh’s jarring writing. Every other sentence reads like an intrusive thought. But it is clear, that despite the nastiness, there are brief moments of respite and tenderness. I’m glad to have stuck around for them.

As always, here are some quotes out of context:

“Everybody was so obsessed with being understood” (98)

“I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself” (220)

“‘Experiences are just time passing in different ways. Time passes and continues on and on. It has nowhere to go. Call him…Life can be strange sometimes, and knowing it can be doesn’t seem to make it any less so. I know I don’t have any real wisdom. I don’t have any wonderful ideas. I am lucky to have found a few nice people here and there.’” (258-259)

“When he is angry with me, I feel he loves me even more, and that feels good to me, even though it also feels bad” (279)

Deyana

To be transparent, I was a bit repulsed when I first started reading this. And then slowly, gradually, like a frog eased into lukewarm to boiling water, I became accustomed to Moshfegh’s jarring writing. Every other sentence reads like an intrusive thought. But it is clear, that despite the nastiness, there are brief moments of respite and tenderness. I’m glad to have stuck around for them.

As always, here are some quotes out of context:

“Everybody was so obsessed with being understood” (98)

“I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself” (220)

“‘Experiences are just time passing in different ways. Time passes and continues on and on. It has nowhere to go. Call him…Life can be strange sometimes, and knowing it can be doesn’t seem to make it any less so. I know I don’t have any real wisdom. I don’t have any wonderful ideas. I am lucky to have found a few nice people here and there.’” (258-259)

“When he is angry with me, I feel he loves me even more, and that feels good to me, even though it also feels bad” (279)

Bella 

quirky short story collection with the classic ottessa recipe of fatphobia, drunken stupor, and awkward sexual encounters. some of them were more interesting than others, but overall a decent read for when you're in the airport lol.

markelle e. e.

azer

I love how the author goes really deep on the characters she creates. Really enjoyable reading.

Kady Groen

I LOVED My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and I was excited to read more from Otessa Moshfegh. I love her style of character-studies, and I love that she explores super unlikable characters that I still want to read about. I did enjoy this collection, although it ended up feeling pretty repetitive by the end for me.

Sara Taylor

this book was so awful. two stars is generous. i understand that the shorts are intentionally grotesque but it was just the same story over and over again! characters had no distinct voice and too often mannerisms/phrases were repeated by different people in different stories. 

and WTF was up with this contempt for fat people? it started to feel personal. again, i get that she writes about the social pariahs and the thoughts that we supposedly all have but never allow ourselves to think or speak. but it was over and over and over again. why were all the main characters disgusted by fat people? why were they always described as gross and ugly? good job on alienating a solid portion of your readers.

georgia greenway

honestly, i didn’t get it. at least i don’t think i did. some of the stories seemed just so odd and crude that it seemed like it was written for shock factor rather than anything else. but i loved the simple complexity of the characters, if that makes sense. each character just has this absolute carelessness for life, no character is scared of hopelessness or meaningless, they invite it, they wade and drown in it. moshfegh’s writing is so sharp and plain, i admire it greatly, she doesn’t waste time with allusions and flowery phrasing, she tells you as it is. all of that being said, i just don’t think this was for me. i LOVED my year of rest and relaxation, for all the same reasons i liked parts of this, but the stories often felt written simply for shock value, shallow, and all very similar in voice, especially for most being written in first person, i feel like with the length of each moshfegh could have dug deeper into most of the characters. they’re all obviously deeply fucked up, but i want to know WHY. WHY are they like this?

Loren Simonson

A short story collection that is extremely character-focused, featuring an aspiring actor, an angry and grieving widower, a creepy neighbor, and a disconnected/disillusioned child. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this collection. I like that she shows people as being so complex and filthy and flawed, but the book just had this general air of apathy that makes it hard to love as a whole.

Melanie Richards

I need to learn at some point that I don’t really connect with short story collections. These stories have that classic problem of building action and then just sadly deflating without resolution. There is one story where that worked nicely, but mostly things fell flat. I can only care so much about terrible people + ennui.

Harlee K

Prickly??? And all of the stories end before there’s a chance for climax and I know that’s the point but sometimes that makes a story feel pointless ✨ plus many of the narrators were awful men that I couldn’t get myself to empathize with or care about 

Amanda Rocha

Homesick For Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh's collection of short stories, comprises a selection of her previously published pieces, culminating in a grand anthology that exemplifies Moshfegh's work precisely. The published book helpfully gathers most of her published short stories together in one accessible volume (excluding only three: "Medicine", Vice, December 1, 2007; "Disgust", The Paris Review, No. 202, Fall 2012; and "Brom", Granta, Issue 139, 2017). A Better Place is the only chapter that was written for the book itself. It stands alone as an ending to the book, but also as a new piece within itself.

The author of the best-seller Eileen has a distinctly identifiable style:

You know, I like weird characters. I don’t know any normal people [laughs]. I do like cliches in my satire: the hipster in the story dancing in the moonlight is a distillation of all the hipsters I knew when younger. I tend to be mean, huh? I’m really hard on men, especially older men.
Moshfegh deliberately chooses to write about the dirtiest and grimiest of our human activities, describing things we all do, the dark things, and finds beauty in the fact that we all indeed have that same darkness within. These stories illuminate the dark truth of human nature, told raw and real, with a morbid sarcasm and dry wit.

The stories are simple and relatable, drawing on settings and feelings that everyone has experienced. Influenced by what upsets her, Moshfegh depicts our normalized 'bad-habit' activities, such as going out clubbing or going to work drunk, and shows how these activities inspire some of the brightest revelations from the characters. Nights of drunk dancing in the club leaves the teacher in "Bettering Myself" fully understanding that makeup covers up the self, only making people more fake and therefore more removed from the self.

The overriding question was: Are we all totally alone, moving with a single consciousness stuck inside our brains and bodies, can we really connect and communicate? If it’s so hard to do that, do we really love each other? And is it possible to really accept love? A lot of the characters in the stories ask themselves that question, seeking out love or self-love in some way, usually preposterously. What’s curious is how isolated I really am, and, paradoxically, by writing about isolation I came out of isolation. I love my stories and I love myself at this point, but when I started I don’t think that was the case.  -from An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Drawing on the external and internal blemishes of people is one of Moshfegh's trademarks. Her fascination with the darker sides of the human experience leads her to explore the way our ugliness can bloom into something beautiful (and, vice versa, how beauty can be deceptively ugly) through her writing.

There’s one earlier on called “A Dark and Winding Road” which is about a pseudo-intellectual Manhattanite on the brink of fatherhood and he goes on a trip to his family’s cabin in the woods to escape his wife who he believes is irrationally cruel to him. The reader gets a sense that this guy is in a panic over change and being asked to change. When there, he thinks a lot, smokes some weed, has some experiences, and a visitor drops by looking for his brother. The story, for me, becomes about someone feeling the hard way that we love people, like people in our family, who are essentially a different version of you.  -from An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Though fictitious, these stories reflect the changes Moshfegh went through in order to find herself, and touches readers in a lot of ways that we can relate to. The stories are approachable and real.

“A Better Place,” which is mostly from the perspective of a female twin child who tries to cope with the impossible decision of escaping a life she does not enjoy or staying in it to be with someone whom she feels affectionate. It’s somewhat sci-fi-esque, but in the end, it’s about deciding if you want to go elsewhere to be happy or stay safe perhaps with someone you love of your own blood. It’s how I felt when I decided to move to Los Angeles and, in turn, move away from some of the values I had been raised with. -from An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Nina Corcoran recognizes that "Ottessa Moshfegh appeals to everyone, if only because she articulates life in a way everyone knows to be true but rarely gets the chance to read about in such mesmerizing." Deeply complex characters performing habitual routines allow readers to relate to the characters in a way that we don't, normally -- allowing us readers to own our darkness and see the beauty in our truth. This treasury of Moshfegh's work demonstrates her use of short fiction as a tool for processing human emotion, sarcasm and dry wit as weapons against the harsh realities of the world.

Arden Kowalski

I love Ottessa Moshfegh as an author. I think that she's extremely talented, and it definitely shines through in this comprehensive collection of reflections on the absolute worst of people. I was suckered into a lot of different stories, but quite a few failed to capture my attention at the midway point and many couldn't stick their landings. All in all, however, this is a fun afternoon read of some wonderfully disturbing stories. I would give it 3.5 stars and recommend that people who have read this check out Moshfegh's novels.

Alexia

Thank you Netgalley and Vintage Publishing for the ARC!
There were some good stories in this collection, but most felt exaggerated to make the reader feel even more uncomfortable, which wasn't necessary because Moshfegh knows how to do that quite well. The ones I liked, I didn't love. The ones I didn't like, I didn't hate. That's why it gets a 2.5 from me.
I do feel like I might recommend it to some people, but it's not a book I would write home about.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time "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 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.

Soumia Abdallah

-bettering myself (3.5)
-mr. wu (4)
-malibu (4)
-the weirdos (4)
-a dark and winding road (3.5)
-no place for good people (4)
-slumming (4.5)
-an honest women (4.5)
-the beach boy (4.5)
-nothing every happens here (3)
-dancing in the moonlight (2)
-the surrogate (4.5)
-the locked room (3)
-a better place (5)

Homesick for Another World

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