Homesick for Another World by Ottesa Moshfegh – Courageous and Brutally Honest Short Stories

By Kristine Garcia on Mar 14, 2017 06:20 PM EDT

Otessa Mosfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her debut novel Eileen was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Will her next book follow the success of Eileen?

According to Good Reads, Otessa Mosfegh’s Homesick for Another World offers unsettling stories. The characters are all unsteady, and they all crave for connection and prosperity, though each in very different ways, but they all go wrong because of their insecurities. Otessa Mosfegh’s grotesque and the outrageous stories are infused with tenderness and compassion. Dark energy deluges from these stories, but beauty comes from strange sources.

As told by The Guardian, Homesick for Another World opens up with a character named Mooney. She is a self-loathing young woman that works in a Catholic institution. She spends the story considering whether or not to tell her headteacher that she is forging the exam results and sleeping on her desk. In another story, the character spends the summer in an unattractive holiday house in a depressed town in New England. She wants to be alone with her $10 drugs and garage sale junk. There is a story about the hero of Malibu who phones a number that he has made up to evade a tax inspector, and makes a date with the woman on the other side of the line. In all of the stories, the people are cruel to each other, and hurtful, and stupid.

According to The Globe and Mail, these stories offer a vast range of human experiences that share fundamental needs and struggles. But they also feel surprisingly cohesive. Mosfgeh’s technique lets her take each story to its natural ending. The characters are lost, messed up and in search for answers that continually escape them. These stories accomplish what fiction is meant to do. They confront the readers with the stuff of being a person, especially the elements they might not like.