Ottessa Moshfegh

The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition. Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection. They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . .: the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.

There's something eerily unsettling about the author'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.

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.

Haven't had a drop in days more so... Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name or situation or orientation â?? he may have killed a man.

Un thriller espeluznante, hipn tico y divertido. Una primera novela poderosa, que cautiva y perturba al lector. La voz de Ottessa Moshfegh irrumpe con fuerza en las letras norteamericanas. Recuerda este nombre: Eileen. La Navidad ofrece muy poco a Eileen Dunlop, una chica modesta y perturbada atrapada entre su papel de cuidadora de un padre alcoh lico y su empleo administrativo en Moorehead, un correccional de menores cargado de horrores cotidianos. Eileen templa sus tristes d as con fantas as perversas y sue a con huir a una gran ciudad. Mientras tanto, llena sus noches con peque os hurtos en la tienda local, espiando a Randy, un ingenuo y musculoso guardia del reformatorio, y limpiando los desastres que su padre deja en casa. Cuando la brillante, guapa y alegre Rebecca Saint John hace su aparici n como nueva directora educativa de Moorehead, Eileen es incapaz de resistirse a esa milagrosa e incipiente amistad. Pero en un giro digno de Hitchcock, el cari o de Eileen por Rebecca la convierte en c mplice de un crimen. Mi nombre era Eileen ha sido ganador del prestigioso Premio PEN/Hemingway al mejor debut literario, nominado al Man Booker Prize 2016 y uno de los mejores libros del a o. Cr ticas: Si Jim Thompson se casara con Patricia Highsmith (imaginen el hogar) podr an haber conspirado juntos para imaginar algo como Eileen. Es m s negra que el negro y fr a como un t mpano. Una narraci n brillante y terriblemente divertida. John Banville Una de las nuevas voces m s virtuosas de los ltimos a os. Su prosa es asombrosa, ingeniosa y electrizante. Bustle Eileen es una obra extraordinaria, siempre oscura y sorprendente, por momentos desagradable y en ocasiones hilarante. Conf en en m nunca han le do algo remotamente parecido. Patrick Anderson, Washington Post Su protagonista es todo menos com n: es vivaz y humana. Una novela cautivadora. Moshfegh escribe frases hermosas. Una tras otra se despliegan, juguetonas, escandalosas, inteligentes, morbosas, ingeniosas y mordaces. Lily King, New York Times Book Review Moshfegh trabaja como una maga que insta a la expectativa. Kevin Rabalais, The Sydney Morning Herald Eileen enciende la relaci n simbi tica entre el amor y el odio, la esperanza y el enga o, y, para el lector, entre la repulsi n y el enganche absoluto. Boris Kachka, New York Magazine Una descendiente de Nathaniel Hawthorne y Raymond Carver, Moshfegh transforma el veneno en algo embriagador. Rivka Galchen Una novela de debut con un prop sito macabro. Hay un radicalismo punk en su representaci n de una joven mujer t mida y, al mismo tiempo, grotesca y perversa. The New Yorker Una joven escritora que ya posee una visi n muy perspicaz de los callejones m s oscuros de la psique humana. Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour. So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes--a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen's story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.