Homesick for Another World : Stories

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.

Editorial Reviews

Dark, confident, prickling stories. . . . Moshfegh uses ugliness as if it were an intellectual and moral Swiss Army knife. . . . Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter. There’s some Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Katherine Dunn in her interest in freaks and quasi-freaks. . . . At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood.“ –Dwight Garner, New York Times

„A fluent, deeply talented artist . . . Moshfegh quickly established herself as an important new voice in the literary world, and her concerns for those isolated not only in the margins of society but within the physical confines of the body itself mirrored the work of brilliant predecessors like Mary Gaitskill, Christine Schutt and, in some ways, Eileen Myles. Homesick for Another World continues that exploration but with a wider range, over a larger landscape. It’s a paradox that in order to locate a sense of national character–and that ever-elusive American dream–art must continually probe the places where that dream seems to have all but disappeared.“ –New York Times Book Review

„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

„On second and third reading, these stories reveal coils of plain language and quick narratives tight as songs. What is at first urgent and disorienting becomes a hymn, improving with repetition, all of it worth memorizing.“ –Village Voice

„[A] stunning debut short story collection. . . . Moshfegh displays a preternatural ability in short fiction, her stories impeccably shaped, her sentences sharp, and her voice controlled and widely confident; the stories of Homesick For Another World are near perfect examples of the form. . . . What makes the pieces composing Homesick so thrilling, in addition to their technical inscrutability, is their ability to surprise–with their ferocity, depravity, and casual violence, with their very ability to so consistently unsettle. . . . Amid the collection’s dark tone, Moshfegh imbues an equally dark humor, at times absurd, at others melancholy and bone-dry. . . . If you’re the kind of person who laughs when the grandma gets axed in „A Good Man Is Hard To Find,“ you’ll be right at home in Homesick.“ –AV Club

„Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, Homesick for Another World, couldn’t come at a better time. Notions of class and power are in an unpredictable flux. A new elite rises, flipping the deck into the air. Nobody knows where the cards will land. So here comes Moshfegh, whose imaginative writing about train-wreck characters, rich and poor, adheres to a relentlessly dim worldview where a divided America comes together in the muck. . . . The best stories in the collection, however, contain memorable, conflicting images of squalor and beauty, chaos and pattern.“ –Associated Press

„All psychologically astute, astringently funny and wonderfully entertaining.“ –Minneapolis Star Tribune

„Startling and impressive new short story collection. . . . Despite her unsparing dissection of their paranoias, fetishes, and failings, Moshfegh doesn’t condescend to her characters; she is both gimlet-eyed and compassionate . . . there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.“ –Boston Globe

„The characters in this collection are an unlovely bunch but make for an irresistible read. . . . Moshfegh–a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based writer whose Man Booker-shortlisted novel Eileen (2016) infused the same sensibility into a witty, skillfully told suspense story–has other tones and tricks at her command. She writes terrific, attention-grabbing openings, and impactful last lines that don’t strain for a lapidary effect. Her damaged-girl deadpan snark is second to none . . . the authority of her storytelling means that she’s able to bring the reader along with her on some surprising paths to her typically desolate destinations.“ –Financial Times

„Homesick for Another World will scorch you like a blowtorch.“ –John Waters, New York Times Book Review

„Stunning short story collection. . . . There’s not a story in Homesick for Another World that’s anything less than original and perfectly constructed. Moshfegh’s talent is unique, and her characters–unfiltered, cold, frequently pathetic–are all the more memorable for their faults and obliviousness. Anyone who’s experienced the special kind of homesickness that lacks a home will find something to relate to in Moshfegh’s unsettling, sharp stories.“ –NPR

„These stories are Moshfegh’s deepest, darkest moments of introspection. Let them in.“ –Electric Literature

„The title and cover of Homesick for Another World might lead you to believe Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories are set in outer space, but she’s done the opposite: approached Earth as if it were an alien planet. . . . Moshfegh imbues her anguished realism with equal parts murky dread and clever turns of phrase. But for stories about isolation and loneliness, they are also oddly funny . . . a short story collection that’s as consistent–and often brilliant–as they come.“ –GQ

„Ottessa Moshfegh’s startling new stories are darkly, prickly, gross–and impressive. . . . Despite her unsparing dissection of their paranoias, fetishes, and failings, Moshfegh doesn’t condescend to her characters; she is both gimlet-eyed and compassionate. These are ‘sad. . . lonely and troubled’ people, but many are improbably appealing; even the most twisted and tortured have recognizably human qualities . . . if you can stomach the discomfort, there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.“ –Boston Globe

„Psychologically astute, astringently funny and wonderfully entertaining . . . Moshfegh’s singular stories are unified by bold ideas, intoxicating detail and perfectly calibrated humor and pathos.“ –Minneapolis Star Tribune

„Sentences looped and pulled into perfect slipknots: Moshfegh’s ear is original, and her command of form, expert. I would read anything she writes.“ –Harper’s

„Homesick for Another World showcases her mastery with tales of a range of creeps and weirdos in despair. . . . This cast of boors may not be the kind of folks readers would seek out to spend time with in real life. But in Moshfegh’s stories, their company is irresistible.“ –Time

„Homesick for Another World is an impressive study of human vulnerability and self-deception, through which the reader is guided by a cynical and darkly funny literary voice.“ –1843 Magazine

„Expertly crafted stories. . . . 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.“ –Publishers Weekly (starred)

„[Moshfegh] is fearless in her probing of her characters’ emotional wounds, proceeding with such a sure touch readers are compelled, not repelled. The directness of her style demands that we register the life ‘stuffed between the mattress and the wall.’ While it is not always an easy read, this collection will leave readers with a sharper, more compassionate sense of the human condition.“ –Booklist (starred review)

„A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its discontents.“ –Kirkus

– From the Publisher

A character in one of Otessa Moshfegh’s stories says of a Polish barmaid he drinks away Christmas with, „There was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman.“ The same could be said of Moshfegh herself. In her terrific debut short story collection, her dark vision misses nothing. What Moshfegh sees is often ugly. Her characters are alcoholics, drug users, compulsive skin pickers. They are self-deluded about their lives and their chances at love, capable of casual cruelty and callous judgments.

Yet Moshfegh treats this motley crew with compassion and dignity. She has made no secret in interviews that she has struggled herself with being a misfit. She was born in Massachusetts. Her mother was from Croatia, her father from Iran, and her experience as both an insider and an outsider in America deeply informs her work.

Homesick for Another World collects the stories that Moshfegh has published over the past several years, most frequently in The Paris Review. Her first book, McGlue, was an experimental novella about a drunken sailor accused of murder, published by the small press Fence Books. She followed that in 2015 with her novel Eileen, which was hailed by some as the next Gone Girl.

Eileen never approached the gonzo popularity of Gillian Flynn’s runaway bestseller – though it received plenty of recognition and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Set in New England in 1964, its antiheroine, a bulimic twenty-four- year-old who lives with her alcoholic father and works in a boys’ prison, is far too neurotic and self-loathing. Moshfegh has said that Eileen was her attempt to write a commercial novel that would sell. As wonderfully idiosyncratic as the book is, it does have a conventional story arc and even features a femme fatale of sorts.

Moshfegh’s short stories are weirder, their narrative arcs more erratic, their characters more rebarbative. She’s drawn comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, in part because of her obsession with odd, unsettling characters but also because she sets in motion events that are surprising, even bizarre, yet somehow feel inevitable. But Moshfegh’s darkly comic voice – and her willingness to plumb the biological and even scatological in search of what makes us human – set her work apart. Moshfegh’s stories feel like dark rooms in which someone has briefly turned on a light.

All of her characters are looking for love in one guise or another. „Bettering Herself,“ the story that won The Paris Review’s prestigious Plimpton Prize, features a wine- soaked teacher at a Catholic school who’s harassing her ex- husband. In „A Dark and Winding Road,“ a lawyer spends a weekend away from his pregnant wife, with whom he is fighting, and capitalizes on a case of mistaken identity when a visitor shows up at his door to form a brief connection. In „Nothing Ever Happens Here,“ a young man who’s left home to seek his fortune as a Hollywood actor finds in his landlady a mother figure whose absolute belief in him belies his talent.

Moshfegh’s stock-in-trade are bizarre, marginal characters – those people it might be easier if we just ignored – and yet she’s equally capable of illuminating the poignancy of the kind of people who might fade into the background at a party. In „The Beach Boy,“ John, a dermatologist, finds himself suddenly widowed when his wife, Marcia, suffers an apparent aneurysm. At her funeral, he discovers, as we all do, that grief is not his métier: Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she’d touched their lives. Marcia would have liked that, John thought – all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She’d have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her. What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room . . . Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia’s coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?

Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she’d touched their lives. Marcia would have liked that, John thought – all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She’d have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her. What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room . . . Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia’s coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?

Moshfegh’s dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women not so far out of college…They’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments…Like Diane Arbus, Moshfegh lights things from below. Psychologically, you don’t see well-set dinner tables in her fiction. You see the chewed gum and crusted snot stuck to the table’s underside, the run in the hostess’s stocking. If her work has echoes of other writers, her tone is her own. At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood.
– The New York Times – Dwight Garner

A talented story writer can range an immense landscape-as Chekhov did in Russia-zeroing in on precise situations of intense isolation and, story by story, drawing what seems to be a map of national character. The bigger the country, the more necessary the short story form. In her excellent first collection, Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh…moves from the West Coast to East Coast (with a brief stop in China) and homes in on characters in states of weirdly dynamic paralysis, trapped between the pains of the past-bad childhoods, bad relationships, bad marriages-and dreams of the future. If there’s a thematic thread weaving through this collection, it’s the complicated relationship between entrapment in the physical body-her characters are often probing, picking and searching with their fingertips, as if seeking beauty and potential grace-and entrapment in social landscapes.
– The New York Times Book Review – David Means

*09/05/2016
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. (Jan.)
– Publishers Weekly

09/01/2016
Drawing on personal experience, National Jewish Book Award winner Kertes (Gratitude) takes us along as brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee Hungary during the 1956 revolution for the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina.
– Library Journal

*2016-10-05
Dysfunctional relationships of many stripes–crumbling marriages, bad dates, slacker partners–drive this dark and quirky clutch of stories.Moshfegh’s most remarkable talent early in her career is to turn distasteful domestic situations into magnetic storytelling: her superb debut novel, Eileen (2015), is a Highsmith-ian tale of alcoholism, abuse, and unrequited love, and though the 14 stories in this collection don’t let much more sunlight in, their concision and gallows humor do give them a lift. In „The Beach Boy,“ a longtime married couple returns from a vacation, and when the wife suddenly dies, her undeveloped vacation photos force the husband to reassess his understanding of her (did she really hook up with a prostitute?) and himself. In „A Dark and Winding Road,“ a well-off man runs into his reprobate brother’s meth-smoking girlfriend, a meeting that proves (in quintessentially Moshfegh-ian phrasing) „disgusting–just as I’d always hoped it to be.“ Youngsters are no more or less foolish, like the aspiring actor in „Nothing Ever Happens Here“ who falls for his aging landlord, the broke Brooklyn hipster in „Dancing in the Moonlight“ who schemes to seduce a high-end furniture designer, or the narrator of „The Weirdos“ who can’t quite extract herself from her boorish boyfriend. For all these foibles, though, Moshfegh never approaches her characters from a position of cruelty, with an intention to mock them; they are for the most part ordinary people undone by their desires, just in more peculiar and Day-Glo fashion than everyday life. Moshfegh’s prose is usually plainly realist, but „Mr. Wu,“ about a man who devises a complex scheme to seduce a woman running a Chinese internet cafe, is a piercing fable of unrequited love. „Life can be strange sometimes, and knowing it can be doesn’t seem to make it any less so,“ one character says, and Moshfegh has proven herself more willing than her contemporaries to dive into the muck of that strangeness. A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its many discontents.

– Kirkus Reviews