Ottessa Moshfegh does a great job creating the characters in her stories. The plots are simple and to the point, and each story is a quick read. My problem is the content of the stories aren’t something I’m comfortable with. While I enjoyed the character descriptions I detested what the characters did. I enjoy reading about other lifestyles and places, but this one wasn’t enjoyable. I felt like I was in the underbelly of humanity; cheap rooms and rough areas; out late in the night to meet total strangers.
While I applaud her writing skills, I didn’t enjoy the content of Moshfegh’s writing. Others should at least give it a try, though. We all have unique opinions. I didn’t enjoy the book but I don’t want to persuade others to avoid it.
(I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Thank you to Penguin Press and NetGalley for making it available.)

Thanks for my copy. I loved Eileen--it made my best-of-year-list, but I am not the reader for this book. I'm passing on reviewing it and I don't like to write negative reviews. Thanks again.

I was going to say "unique" or "intriguing" but what I want to say is "disturbing". Why? Because the characters are so pedestrian, and yet they are anything but-- they do and say and like things that make me uncomfortable, and that is the beauty of this collection. It is weird. It is truly, often, disturbing. It is well-written and cohesive and un-put-downable and I wish, wish, wish I could write like Moshfegh. So cliche to say she is raw and true... but I don't have better words to describe how I feel. I am impressed. I will keep reading, even when what I'm reading is difficult to read.

I very rarely don’t finish a book that I have started, but this book was one of those few. I got about a third of the way through and then had to stop.
First, I must say that the writing is very good – and maybe that is my problem. The characters are all very vividly brought to life, in very little space – as is important in a short story. However, I would rather they had remained a lot less vivid and / or memorable. None of the characters is a particularly bad person, and they may even be similar to people you have met, but are lucky enough not to know well. There is so much self-loathing here, and when the characters are not loathing themselves, they tend to loathe those around them – often those who probably thought they were the “nearest and dearest”.
The book portrays a very depressing and nihilistic view of humanity. Perhaps this is what we would discover humanity is really like, if we could read our neighbour’s inner most thoughts. Personally, I would prefer to maintain the “illusion” of civility and society, and leave this book to other readers with a stronger constitution than I.

Ottessa Moshfegh's Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Eileen generated a very mixed reaction among readers last year. However, I was one of those who really enjoyed (if that's the right word) her debut novel and I was intrigued by her new book 'Homesick for Another World', a collection of fourteen short stories which will be published this week in the UK. The tales in this collection range from 'The Beach Boy' about a middle-aged couple on an unnamed tropical island to 'Bettering Myself' from the perspective of an alcoholic maths teacher in a Catholic school to 'Nothing Ever Happens Here' in which an aspiring actor in Hollywood falls for his landlady.

If you thought ‘Eileen’ was repulsive and unsettling in a good way, then it is likely that you will also like 'Homesick for Another World'. On the other hand, if you thought 'Eileen' was repulsive and unsettling in a bad way, then you may wish to avoid this book too. As shown in some of the Man Booker Prize discussions last year, Moshfegh's choice of subject matter doesn’t always have the widest appeal and her pitch-perfect portraits of a new collection of weirdos and losers is likely to confirm this. The main protagonists in these short stories - both male and female - are for the most part similarly repressed and grotesque as the eponymous character of Moshfegh's debut novel and intense self-loathing appears to be a recurring personality trait. Most memorable and disturbing of all is Mr Wu who is certainly a character I won't forget in a hurry.

In less capable hands, the characters in Moshfegh's stories could easily become tired caricatures, particularly as their creepy personalities overlap by a fair amount despite the different settings and situations they find themselves in across this collection. However, Moshfegh has a very distinctive style of writing which on the surface can come across as being quite abrupt and detached but also allows her to explore characters more subtly through "showing" rather than "telling" their stories.

The title of the collection is certainly fitting given the themes of alienation and dissatisfaction which recur throughout. In each story, Moshfegh dares to explore what many would consider to be the most deplorable even unspeakable aspects of her dysfunctional characters whilst showing that these traits also happen to be their most human qualities. This is what makes 'Homesick for Another World' so terrifying yet satisfying overall. Many thanks to Penguin for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Pub. Date: Jan. 17, 2017
Publisher: Penguin Group

If you enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s book “Eileen,” you will enjoy her latest book, “Homesick for Another World.” If you didn’t, stay far away from this one, for it is even darker and more depraved. “Homesick” is a collection of 14 short stories. As in “Eileen” Moshfegh examines the souls of her misfit characters, each one odder, weirder, and harder to understand than the last. Characters are written with an emphasis on flaws like rashes, greasy skin, pimples, puss pockets, and fat pockets. So that sometimes it felt like I was trying to read with icky things crawling on me, causing me to want to take breaks. But I couldn’t because each character is so confusing, yet so fascinating, they had me coming back for more. Plus, I never felt that the author was mocking, shaming, or pitying her characters, but rather acknowledging that this is what real people can look like.

“Beach Boy” is one of the easiest to read, meaning there is nothing physically grotesque to turn your stomach in the story. A long-married, NYC, couple seem to have a good, if predictable life. Twice a month they meet two other couples for dinner at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. At one dinner outing, the couple talks about their last vacation with its beautiful beaches. The only problem on the island is the poverty, with natives begging, and prostituting themselves on the beaches. This made them feel very uncomfortable (not out of rich-guilt reasons but because they found them intrusive.) This married couple read like boring, straight and narrow bourgeois snobs. When returning home from their dinner, while eating popcorn and watching a movie, the wife suddenly dies. After the funeral, the husband picks up his now deceased wife’s vacation photos. It appears that his rather prudish and predictable wife might have had a sexual encounter with one of the male beach prostitutes, forcing the husband to wonder if he ever knew his wife, or their life together at all.

In “Bettering Myself” an alcoholic teacher at a Catholic school in NYC fudges her students’ answers on their state exams so they won’t fail, and so she doesn’t have to bother teaching them. Her apartment is a revolving door for sexual partners. She keeps promising herself that she will change but never does. Still, it is hard to dislike her. She tries to keep a bright (usually way off base) outlook, so she doesn’t feel so sad. While waiting on the line at a McDonald’s she sees a person outside digging alone through the trash and feels grateful to at least be surrounded by all the people in the fast food restaurant. Also, the dialogue between herself and her students is inappropriately wicked and sometimes I laughed out loud. It is that kind of dark humor that keeps you laughing in what could be a very gloomy story.

“No Place for Good People” is “Homesick’s” wittiest satire. A widower who doesn’t know how to fill up his day volunteers in a residential home for the mentally disabled. He did not care to work for his wife’s father and now enjoys working at the group home where he is appreciated. He is a caring and well-meaning volunteer, but doesn’t always think things through with the men in his charge. There are three pals who live in the home and it is one of their birthdays. He takes the home’s van and signs them out for a birthday dinner celebration. The birthday guy (who hides his playboy magazines) wants to go to Hooters. He agrees and off they go. Of course, now the reader is expecting some sort sexual disaster approaching (especially since the reader knows that his father-in-law once took him to Hooters, which read rather creepy since his father-in-law seemed to be pushing him to cheat on his wife). However, when they arrive at the destination, much to the birthday guy’s dismay, they learn that Hooters is now a Friendly’s. And somehow, this all makes him realize that his life is much better now than when his wife was alive.

The grimmest in the collection is “A Better Life.” At first, I thought I was reading a creepy fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm, or a child’s disturbing fantasy. The story begins with a child explaining that she comes from another place and that it is not a real place like on earth. She doesn’t really know what, or where she came from. The reader quickly learns that she hates everything about the earth but her brother. It is her brother who she asks for help getting back to the other place (or whatever it is?). He informs her that to return she must either die or kill the “right person.” She decides to kill the right person. It took me a bit to realize that I was not reading a fairy tale, but the thoughts of a grieving little girl whose father has died. She picks the local bad man, who may, or may not have raped her mother for the girl, and her brother are too young to have a word for “rape”. I felt my muscles tense knowing that all of this will lead to a horrifying ending.

“A Better Place” is the last in the collection. I didn’t make the connection of the title to the characters until I read this last piece. They were all homesick for another world, or a better place, and a better life. (Warning to those who judge books by their covers; the spaceship on this cover is misleading making one think that this will be a sci-fi read.) Moshfegh is an extremely talented writer. At the tender age of 31, she has already won a few awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award, and I strongly suspect she will soon be a household name. She seems to have the gift of insight when looking into human behavior that she translates into her characters. But for my own taste in reading, I hope she attempts to dabble in different genres, and maybe write a bit less about pimple popping.

I can tell that this collection of short stories is going to be a "Marmite" book that some people will love and some will hate. The author does not shy away from the dark side of human nature, and many of her characters are repulsive. However, I found it difficult to tear myself away from the book, and the people in the stories feel so real. Really intriguing and with so many layers. I can imagine this making a fantastic book club pick and will be recommending it as such.

I'm sure that this book will receive a lot of praise but I just didn't enjoy it. Short story collections are often wonderful because they take you in several directions, whether united by a theme or not. In this case, the only direction seems to be down. Didn't like the characters, didn't like the plots, just plain didn't like them. The redeeming quality is the writing but at the same time, it just couldn't overcome the rest of the problems for me. I put this down once and picked it up again after reading Moshfegh's essay on gin in the Wall Street Journal; then I put it down again. THanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Thanks you form the opportunity to early read, but I am not the right reader for this book. Found it much to explicit and not at all what I was expecting.

Let’s just get this out of the way: the cover for this short story collection is amazing. I’m already calling it one of the best covers of 2017. Unfortunately, it’s also misleading, promising weird, bizarre, otherworldly stories, and I had to slog through 13 grim and gross stories until the very last story matched the excitement of the cover.

That final story, ‘A Better Place,’ was good. It was very, very, very good. The rest? Not for me. But let me explain.

It’s hard to review this book without comparing it to Moshfegh’s Eileen. I liked Eileen because it had a brilliant conclusion, but the majority of the novel was this dark, disturbing character study—if that’s the best part of Eileen for you, you will ADORE Homesick for Another World. That’s all this collection is: dark, disturbing (and often disgusting) character studies. I enjoy stories like this, to an extent, but these stories grew repetitive incredibly fast. It’s as if I knew all the content of the next story before I began reading it. (The final story, ‘A Better Place, is the exception here. I’m seriously in love with that one.)

This review would be remiss if I didn’t point out how extremely well written these stories are, however. Moshfegh’s writing is so vivid, her prose provocative, without feeling flowery or over-the-top. It’s impressive, like Moshfegh chose every single word very carefully with intent, but at the same time her writing was natural and flowing. I actually prefer her writing in Homesick to Eileen.

I don’t think this collection is for most readers. I’d only recommend it to those looking for a very specific atmosphere for their next read. However, those certain readers are going to absolutely fall in love.

I kept feeling that something terrible was going to happen, but it never really did. Just very unhappy people doing ineffective things. Horror of the mind, instead of the body I guess. I really don't know why you'd want to read this, even though it's well-written. I can't imagine it improving anybody's day.

Otessa Moshfegh had me with her Booker nominated [book:Eileen|23453099]. While the book was really creepy, Moshfegh pulled off quite a feat in creating such a relentlessly but complex unsavoury protagonist. That talent didn't play out as well for me in this short story collection. There were a few stories I really liked, but overall, as a collection, the stories started to feel like too much of the same flavour. Moshfegh is extremely talented at depicting flawed disturbed characters, and she certainly doesn't shy away from ugly side of humanity or things that would turn many people's stomachs. When these talents are pushed too far, they feel more like a party trick than an study of human complexity. So the stories in this collection that worked the best for me were those where the characters' circumstances were more subtle -- for example, The Beach Boy about a middle aged couple's return from a beach vacation and Nothing Ever Happens Here about a young man who moves to LA hoping to become a star. Given how much I liked Eileen and Moshfegh's talent, I would definitely read her next novel but I'm not sure her short stories are for me. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

If you thought the eponymous antiheroine of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen was downtrodden, depraved and desperate... well, let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet.

The characters in Moshfegh's short stories are wretched and invariably lonely, even (perhaps especially) when they are not alone. They haunt shabby apartments and dirty restaurants. They're ugly on either the inside or outside, or both. If they have a job, they probably hate it. If they have a partner, they probably hate them. If they do experience any small bright spark of contentment, it's bound to be somehow extinguished. More than anything else, the people in these stories bubble over with contempt: for themselves, for others, for the world.

Moshfegh has a tendency to push far enough past realism that she seems to start slipping into satire. 'Mr. Wu', in which the title character courts the woman of his dreams by sending her a horrifically insulting text message, feels like a pitch-black riff on the culture of pick-up artists and 'negging'; in 'Bettering Myself', it's impossible to believe the incessantly negligent protagonist would be able to hang on to her job as a teacher for more than a day. There are hints of Lindsay Hunter's grotesque visions of working-class America, as well as the grimy dystopia of George Saunders. Though a handful deviate from type – 'The Beach Boy' revolves around a well-off couple in their fifties – most fit a mould of sorts: misfits living in sorry conditions and behaving in misanthropic, occasionally shocking, ways which are difficult to understand or rationalise.

Many of the stories also have what you might term non sequitur endings. At best, they seem deliberately built that way: a glimpse into twilight worlds in which the cruellest possible punchline is that life goes on. At worst (an example being the otherwise strong 'A Dark and Winding Road') they feel like the author found an almost-finished draft and stuck a random paragraph on the end to make it resemble a complete story in the most basic sense. Moshfegh gave a now-notorious interview about Eileen in which she claimed to have started writing it as a joke, using a manual called The 90-Day Novel, but it's this book, much more than that one, that feels like it's been hastily assembled.

If you've read Eileen, it's impossible not to feel the shadow of Eileen Dunlop hanging over these stories. It's not unusual for them to slip into the same lacerating tone of self-hatred Moshfegh used in her novel:

Nothing made me happy. I went out to the pool, skimmed the surface of the blue water with my hand, praying for one of us, my boyfriend or me, to die. ('Weirdos')
I had a thing about fat people. It was the same thing I had about skinny people: I hated their guts. ('Malibu')
Earth is the wrong place for me, always was and will be until the day I die. ('A Better Place')

Nevertheless, I'd hesitate to say 'if you liked Eileen, you'll love this'. Spending time inside an 'unlikeable' character's head for the duration of an entire novel challenges you to understand them, find empathy, collude with their actions, see yourself reflected. Being confronted with a slew of bile-filled individuals and dismal situations in quick succession is another thing altogether, and offers little opportunity to get to grips with the whys and wherefores of these people's lives.

My favourite story in Homesick For Another World was 'Weirdos', an unpredictable narrative that contains more discernible traces of humour than most of the others. 'Slumming' and 'Dancing in the Moonlight' also stand out. There are great lines in almost every story, making them strongest at the sentence level, and it's possible to open the book at any page and pull out a wonderful soundbite or piece of description. Ultimately, however, I found the cumulative effect of so many negative characters, filled with inward and outward loathing, draining. This wasn't a book I relished reading – in fact, finishing it was like forcing bitter medicine down my throat. There's no doubt Moshfegh is a technically excellent writer, but I can't give a particularly high rating or recommendation when my prevailing reaction was 'thank god that's over'.

This book should be marked as rated X. It's perverted. A high school teacher who does nothing but moan and groan.. either about her students or her sex life. Not one that I would recommend to anyone. Ever.