Homesick for Another World

By Ottessa Moshfegh,

Book cover of Homesick for Another World: Stories

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Homesick for Another World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Times in my life when I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought, while making those choices: To hell with you people, I don’t care what you think of me, I’m going to be my own person, screw appearances and reputation. Other times I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought: I’m doing what’s expected of me, that’s all. This collection of short stories offers a gallery of complex and warm characters, some of whom disgrace themselves via transgression, some via passivity. 

From Benjamin's list on fiction about being disgraced.

Moshfegh revels in gross bodily functions, using them almost as an artistic palette. If it stinks, bleeds, sweats, erupts, or otherwise makes you gag, it shows up in her celebrated book of short stories, individually published in Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta before being collected in Homesick. Just by its title, the story “Slumming” could stand for the whole. A depressed, middle-aged, New York City schoolteacher sleeps all her summers away, holing up and doing hard drugs in an equally depressed Upstate hamlet, where the local “zombies,” i.e. young opioid dealers, emerge as the most…

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