Moshfegh, Ottessa
Entry updated 4 September 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1981- ) US author, active from around 2005, most of her work being nonfantastic. The tortured passages of living as experienced by the protagonists in the tales assembled as Homesick for Another World (coll 2017 ebook) are viewed with a "Martian" eye that conveys a sense of the surreal extremity of the human condition. In her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a young woman responds to the trauma of the modern world by deciding she will spend a year asleep; initially realistic, her bouts of slumber increasingly resemble Suspended Animation. Awakening just before 9/11, she enters the new world. Moshfegh's fifth novel, Lapvona (2022), is set in a imaginary country within a vaguely delineated medieval frame; life in the ruler's court is conveyed with surreal intensity. [JC]
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh
born Boston, Massachusetts: 20 May 1981
works (selected)
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation (New York: Penguin Press, 2018) [hb/]
- Lapvona (New York: The Penguin Press, 2022) [hb/from Francisco de Zurbaran]
collections and stories
- Homesick for Another World (London: Penguin Books/Vintage Digital, 2017) [coll: ebook: na/]
links
previous versions of this entry