Unfortunately, the Netgalley pdf of this book was unreadable, with the text jumbled and random paragraph spaces. I really loved it though, when I could manage to make sense of it - Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiercely awesome writer, I've loved everything by her.

Stunning short stories from one of most promising young writers around. If you liked her immensely successful novel Eileen, you'll love this.

Anyone who read "Eileen" will know that Ottessa Moshfegh is an original voice in fiction. These short stories do not disappoint. The author does self delusion and damage very well - she is unflinching in her examination of her characters yet not without compassion.. This collection is so interesting - dark yet funny, grotesque but also beautiful. Excellent.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here! This is a truly extraordinary collection of short stories that shine an unforgiving unflinchingly honest spotlight on the less pleasant sides of mankind. All the characters seem to be horribly trapped by their circumstances, and so their raw emotions make for uneasy reading. From the schoolteacher taking drugs and sleeping in her classroom, to the husband escaping to his own retreat away from his wife and family, these are uncomfortable, brutally frank portraits of everymen and everywomen. Scrape the surface of what looks like normality, and see what lurks beneath the surface.
It does get a little hard-going, as it is relentless in its bleakness. It's like a really dark version of the Guardian's "What I'm Really Thinking" series. That said, if you're prepared for this plunge into the pit of despair, there is a lot of beautiful ugliness to enjoy within the pages of this book. A truly fascinating read.

There were some good stories in this collection, but most felt exaggerated to make the reader feel even more uncomfortable, which wasn't necessary because Moshfegh knows how to do that quite well. The ones I liked, I didn't love. The ones I didn't like, I didn't hate. That's why it gets a 2.5 from me.
I do feel like I might recommend it to some people, but it's not a book I would write home about.

As often happens for short story collections, some are better than others, and the book's final liking is therefore an average. All Moshfegh's tales have a certain depressive quality, a tendency of the situations told to turn to the worst, somewhat disturbing and sometimes, in my opinion, forced. In any case, this is a great exercise of writing skills, very enjoyable as a whole.
I thank Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and Netgalley for providing me a free copy in exchange for a honest review.

Personally not really my kind of short stories...many of them reminded me a lot of Lucia Berlin, whom I preferred. The NetGalley proof was also especially poor quality, lots of strange characters and extra lines, making it difficult and unpleasant to read...which probably didn't help Moshfegh to impress me. Have higher hopes for 'Eileen', which I've not yet read.

(If I could give this a 3.5, I would)
I was really excited to get a reading copy of this, I'd heard about the author's debut and had seen a lot of hype for this new short story collection.
The prose in this work is phenomenal, the issue I had with these stories is that they're gritty and disturbing and disgusting but to the point where it feels it's been laid on with a trowel. I think this is more of a book to dip in and out of, rather than try and read it in one go as I did. The reason for this being that after three or four stories it began to feel repetitive, I lost sight of the truly fantastic writing as I waited in vain for something unexpected to happen or change.
The main focus of these stories is presenting messed-up humans engaging in messed-up behaviour and relationships, but as I've already said, after a while I got a bit sick of reeling back from the image before me, and felt like this was just being presented for shock value. There are so many slightly different negative descriptions of fatness, for example, I swear half of the characters were overweight. There was also a presentation of mental disability that felt like it was being played for its Other potential alone.
All in all, this really is not a terrible book, and I'm aware this may be a very subjective reaction. I will seek out the author's debut novel though, as the writing is utterly amazing and I imagine it might work better over in a longer form.

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.

The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another World will come as no surprise if you’ve read her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Eileen. The people who populate these tales are inappropriate, slack, liars, cheaters, sleezeballs, hypocrites – they are us.

Two stories – ‘Bettering Myself’ and ‘Slumming’ – are narrated by teachers, those bastions of standards and rules and betterment. In ‘Bettering Myself’ which opens the collection, a teacher at a Catholic school keeps a sleeping bag in the back of her room to facilitate naps when she’s still drunk from the previous night; considers one of her students to be a friend, and avoids teaching calculus by talking about her sex life. While ‘Slumming’ is set in the holidays when the narrator goes to live in Alna, a poor town where she owns a summerhouse. There, she eats a footlong sandwich divided in two – one half for lunch, the other for dinner; takes ten dollars’ worth of meth or heroin, depending what’s on offer in the bus-depot restroom three times a week, and occasionally hangs out with Clark who looks after the summerhouse the rest of the year. They slept together the first year she was there, ‘me crouching under the sloped ceiling, his genitals swung in my face like a fist’.

It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do.

Many of the stories are concerned with the behaviour of men. Mr Wu is in love with the woman who dispenses the tokens at the arcade he frequents but doesn’t know how to speak to her. While he makes a plan, he visits sex workers in the city, averting his eyes when he has sex with them because ‘He had learned somewhere that closing your eyes meant that you were in love’. In ‘A Dark and Winding Road’, the narrator escapes to his parents’ cabin in the mountains following a fight with his pregnant wife, ‘to have one last weekend to myself before the baby was born and my life as I’d known it was ruined forever’. There he discovers a dildo underneath the blankets on the bed and an unexpected visitor.

Probably the best piece, if you were to judge each story alone, comes in the middle of the collection: ‘An Honest Woman’. A young woman meets her 60-year-old neighbour, Jeb, over the chain-link fence that separates their gardens. Her partner’s recently left her, while Jeb is widowed and has a nephew about the young woman’s age.

‘I’ll meet her,’ said the nephew. ‘But I’m not saying I’ll take her out. I don’t need any drama.’
‘What drama? You should be so lucky,’ Jeb said. ‘A sweet gal. Comes with baggage, of course, as they all do.’
‘Kids?’ the nephew asked. ‘Forget it.’
‘No, no kids. Emotional issues, more like,’ Jeb said. ‘You know women. Stray cats, all of them, either purring in your lap or pissing in your shoes.’

The story takes a creepy turn when the woman visits Jeb, waiting for his nephew but a storm prevents his arrival. Moshfegh highlights the irony of Jeb’s statement about women quoted above when she has him behave as an entitled, misogynistic white man.

It’s at this point in the collection that Moshfegh’s aim starts to become clear: this is a collection of stories about ordinary people at their worst, it’s a mirror held up to today’s society: to the misogyny, to the privilege, to the hypocrisy. Some of the characters know better but can’t be arsed to do better; some of them make an attempt but fall flat at the first hurdle. The collection’s full of characters for whom, essentially, nothing changes. To pull this off and maintain the interest of the reader is quite a feat and Moshfegh does it with style. Her prose is sharp, nailing thoughts, feelings and the messiness of life, love and sex - of which there is plenty.

This an accomplished collection. Every story is worthy of inclusion but there’s something about them taken together which really is spectacular. Ottessa Moshfegh is a remarkable writer.