By Why do I have such an obsession with weird disturbing books by female authors? I don’t know. Anyway, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another World did not disappoint.
About the Book
Title: Homesick for Another World
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Published: 2017
Genre: fiction, short stories
My Rating: 4/5 stars
My Thoughts
There is something elusively seductive about Ottessa Moshfegh’s prose– even when the content she writes about is bleak, depressing, even stomach-churning, I am inexplicably driven to continue reading. As short story collections go, Homesick for Another World is impressive because of its cohesiveness. Each story in the collection, except for maybe the concluding one, had a very similar tone, mood, and general aura.
My favorites were “Bettering Myself” and “Nothing Ever Happens Here”
In every story, the description is crisp and the world is tangibly real and depressing as hell, like I can feel a blanket pressing down on me with every page turn. The journeys we take with each character seem to go everywhere and nowhere at once. Their narratives are shot through with fatigue and nihilism. But I somehow felt comforted and seen.
“And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.”
Have you read Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh, or any of the individual short stories in it? What did you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
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Frappes and Fiction 
I haven’t read the book, but when you talk about disturbing books by female authors that make you most eager to read on at the bleakest moments — and read on for the sheer entertainment value — I thought of Flannery O’Connor. No one can make you laugh out loud at the bleakest and most violent moments like O’Connor. That last quote you gave could come right out of her oft-anthologized story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (though in O’Connor it would have been phrased and delivered in the topsy-turvy comic style of a Southern redneck 🙂 )
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I’ll put it on the list!
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Note she has some novellas, too (most famous being the set of 3 novellas including “Wise Blood”), but “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of her many short stories. (It’s about 10 pages.)
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