• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2016 October #2
  *Starred Review* Man Booker Prize finalist for Eileen (2015), Moshfegh now presents a collection of short stories exploring aspects of the human experience from which we usually avert our eyes, lives which we would rather not acknowledge. A barely functioning alcoholic teacher at an NYC Catholic school, a pimple-pinching violinist in a locked room, an old man trying to manipulate his young female neighbor, and a girl convinced that killing another person will take her to the better world she came from—these are among the evocatively drawn characters Moshfegh animates to provide glimpses of our collective human psyche. Success, failure, belonging, isolation, connections, and nostalgia all are recalibrated in the ways these individuals live and think and feel. Plot twists are almost irrelevant in Moshfegh's unhesitating illumination of dark places. She is fearless in her probing of her characters' emotional wounds, proceeding with such a sure touch that 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. Copyright 2016 Booklist Reviews.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller.