...startling and impressive ... collectively they reveal Moshfegh’s pervasive preoccupations: ugliness, depravity, wackos and weirdos, the sordid and the morbid, the perverse and the profane ... Despite her unsparing dissection of their paranoias, fetishes, and failings, Moshfegh doesn’t condescend to her characters; she is both gimlet-eyed and compassionate. These are 'sad. . . lonely and troubled' people, but many are improbably appealing; even the most twisted and tortured have recognizably human qualities ... The stories, quite frankly, are not just grotesque; they are gross. Reading them is an uncomfortable experience. The squeamish and the Pollyannaish will likely find life inside Moshfegh’s world harsh, painful, torturous. But if you can stomach the discomfort, there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.

...her stories exploit the fun, singsong qualities of storytelling while peddling a manic savagery that doesn’t fit the medium ... Like her peers—Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Alexandra Kleeman—Moshfegh writes characters who shrink big feelings into flat utterances, the kind of disaffected tone that feels born of the internet and its mechanisms for emotional distance. The overall effect is of an ancient fairytale performed by bad television actors, the kind who seem to be makeup all the way through ... Moshfegh repeatedly subjects the human body to extreme experiences: miscarried pregnancies, intellectual disability, eating disorders. This is not a very modern thing to do, because it is cheap and sadistic. But it is a very postmodern thing to do, because no body is blank and healthy and symbolically normal in real life ... Moshfegh’s stories end with heavy clangs, which makes them feel like fables. But they’re knitted so airily throughout that they also feel like advertisements ... Nell Zink writes like this, and so do Helen DeWitt and Alexandra Kleeman and Tony Tulathimutte. Such books refract ordinary life into the grotesque surreal through their insistent lack of engagement. Although they would find it unpleasant to be grouped by name, I’d call them surreal minimalists. These novelists are the grandchildren of Camus, writers who estrange and estrange until some new world comes glowing through the old, empty one. The emotions are minimal, but the worlds of these novels are colorful and weird. These writers represent the first wave of novelists who truly respond to and incorporate the syntactic and emotional influence of the internet, and our embrace of them, as readers, represents the same. Homesick for Another World abuses its chosen genre, just as Moshfegh intended, but in the way that Dr. Frankenstein abused his raw materials. Raw and red and sutured, his monster was tortured into consciousness, to live.

That sound you hear? Packs of barking dogs, screaming sirens echoing through the hallowed halls of the literary patriarchy? That’s Ottessa Moshfegh and her debut collection of stories, Homesick for Another World setting off the alarm ... Moshfegh has a taste for targeting the culture’s misogyny and male privilege. Sentence to sentence she gleefully manipulates the fates of her despicable cast of entitled, sexually repressed egomaniacs ... Moshfegh writes writes with Bukowksi-like gusto and a loving matter-of-factness about their — or rather she would say our — most base bodily functions. The ways our bodies terrorize us and the satisfaction that can be gained in seizing control ... Amid all this physical deformity, the most successful stories are those about characters that are ugly on the inside. Moshfegh’s flair for evisceration is best displayed when the character isn’t wearing a colostomy bag but a Hermes ... Tempted though you might be, it’s a disservice to the book as a whole to read the stories one after the other. If you could. The sameness of the characters and locations can cause stories to blur together. Moshfegh’s insistence on focusing on the uneasy, outwardly hostile relationship the characters have with their bodies can at times feel puerile and, other times, it obscures the larger story.

She writes terrific, attention-grabbing openings, and impactful last lines that don’t strain for a lapidary effect. Her damaged-girl deadpan snark is second to none, but she inhabits other character types with ease ... the authority of her storytelling means that she’s able to bring the reader along with her on some surprising paths to her typically desolate destinations ... there’s a danger of an effect that sometimes rears up in Todd Solondz’s movies: that of transgressively funny gloom congealing into an aesthetic mannerism instead of an elliptical commentary on the world that inspired it. Moshfegh’s impressively uncensored attack and her storytelling skills mean she usually skirts that danger.

In graceful sentences, Moshfegh lingers on tiny instances of the grotesque. (The effect can be unnerving. She once said of her own writing: 'It's like seeing Kate Moss take a shit.') As well as being unattractive, her characters are often narcissistic, unkind, and plagued by strange preoccupations ... Often Moshfegh's characters are fixated on another person, with desire or with hatred—as if they're looking for someone to blame. Always they are mournful, angry, and driven by a sense that they have not received everything they deserve. A lesser writer might try to soften or redeem these characters, but Moshfegh is more interested in examining the contours of their disappointment, tracing where the shadows fall on unsatisfying lives ... the action seems to take place mostly within the characters' minds, and many of the stories barely even make it out of the protagonist's apartment. The effect can be airless, repetitive, claustrophobic—these people are stuck in their unpromising situations and we, as readers, are trapped in there with them. It's as if Moshfegh were keen to see how much misery we can take. Our tolerance may be higher than we expect. We can't look away from Moshfegh's characters, just as we can't look away from a car wreck.

Shakespeare told us, in Sonnet 118: 'We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.' Moshfegh’s men and women cannot quite cope with this world. They are desperate and lonely and estranged. They want to tear the pain from their hearts, and it is less complicated to void their stomachs. Our empathy for them blends with disgust, which is nearly the definition of the grotesque in literature ... Moshfegh uses ugliness as if it were an intellectual and moral Swiss Army knife. The transgressive sex in her stories can put you in mind of Mary Gaitskill. Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter ... If her work has echoes of other writers, her tone is her own. At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood ... A few of these stories are dead ends or semi-stunts, vignettes that strain for eccentricity. More often, one by one, they click and spin like bullets in a revolver.

...[a] stunning short story collection ... Many authors like their characters to play coy, to circumlocute their way around their motives and desires. Moshfegh doesn't like to play this game. Her characters are largely blunt and unfiltered; you don't have to guess what they're really thinking ... There's not a story in Homesick for Another World that's anything less than original and perfectly constructed. Moshfegh's talent is unique, and her characters — unfiltered, cold, frequently pathetic — are all the more memorable for their faults and obliviousness.

Her limpid, rhythmic prose, sumptuous with detail, isn’t exclusive to west coast towns: it can be aroused by all sorts of American landscapes provided they are past their best. Decay, both moral and corporal, is Moshfegh’s favourite trope and favourite subject ... Mould grows best in closed areas. The miserable towns and half-built apartment blocks provide part of this containment; maze-like plots the remainder. For Moshfegh’s protagonists often retain hopes of fulfilment, albeit generally of the vaguest sort, and powered by these, they set out on bizarre quests ... The conventional thriller shape of Eileen has brought Moshfegh money and popularity. On an artistic level, though, it also allowed some air and light into the dank leaf-mould of her imaginative world. At the end of this absorbing, exhausting and slippery volume, you may well find yourself longing for some of Eileen’s resolution, however conventional such a plot shape may be.

In her terrific debut short story collection, her dark vision misses nothing. What Moshfegh sees is often ugly. Her characters are alcoholics, drug users, compulsive skin pickers. They are self-deluded about their lives and their chances at love, capable of casual cruelty and callous judgments. Yet Moshfegh treats this motley crew with compassion and dignity ... Moshfegh’s darkly comic voice — and her willingness to plumb the biological and even scatological in search of what makes us human — set her work apart. Moshfegh’s stories feel like dark rooms in which someone has briefly turned on a light ... Moshfegh’s stock-in-trade are bizarre, marginal characters — those people it might be easier if we just ignored — and yet she’s equally capable of illuminating the poignancy of the kind of people who might fade into the background at a party.

If there’s a thematic thread weaving through this collection, it’s the complicated relationship between entrapment in the physical body — her characters are often probing, picking and searching with their fingertips, as if seeking beauty and potential grace — and entrapment in social landscapes ... A good story is a high-wire act that uses angle of vision, voice and plot to produce a work that somehow, against all odds, radiates meaning at all levels — in the sentences, the structure and in the absences. Each story in a collection has an aesthetic burden it has created for itself, and it must carry that burden properly. A few of Moshfegh’s stories don’t quite manage to do it; they stagger under their own weight ... Still, even the few other stories that falter give us a sense of watching a fluent, deeply talented artist extend herself and take risks in her quest to master the form ... In several stories set in California, Moshfegh writes with Didionesque precision of blinding white sunlight, of streets lined with dying palm trees and suffused with a dreamy anomie particular to Los Angeles.

Sentences looped and pulled into perfect slipknots: Moshfegh’s ear is original, and her command of form, expert. I would read anything she writes. But while the individual stories sting, in the aggregate they buckle a little under the senselessness of her vision ... Moshfegh’s best characters are those who are frantically burrowing toward some crumb of self-knowledge ... What Moshfegh’s characters are dreaming of, as they lie there smelling like toilets, is freedom — a negative freedom, a horrible freedom, but the only one their view affords.

If the characters in Moshfegh’s stunning debut short story collection have anything in common, it’s that they’re after some kind of life improvement, yet they go about achieving it in all the wrong ways, often deceiving or mistreating others in the process. Moshfegh displays a preternatural ability in short fiction, her stories impeccably shaped, her sentences sharp, and her voice controlled and widely confident; the stories of Homesick For Another World are near perfect examples of the form ... Such bad behavior may seem shocking, yet it exists along the spectrum of more everyday transgressions—spinning the truth, telling white lies, deluding oneself. Shifts take place within these characters, but Moshfegh doesn’t force them into epiphany or contrition; rather, like an indifferent god, she watches them impassively, waiting to see what terrible thing they’ll do next.

...psychologically astute, astringently funny and wonderfully entertaining ... she digs deep into the human psyche to explore oddities, frailties, warped agendas and reckless desires. A discernible cruel streak runs wild, but so, too, does a toxic trail of black humor ... One male narrator’s voice doesn’t ring true, and one broken life is relayed as random acts of self-destruction. Otherwise, Moshfegh’s singular stories are unified by bold ideas, intoxicating detail and perfectly calibrated humor and pathos.

The unpleasant, even grotesque behaviors of her characters seem amplified thanks to Moshfegh’s cool, matter-of-fact prose. In either first-person or close third-person narration, the blunt, unemotional words with which her characters relate their petty cruelties, addictions, and even bodily functions never ceases to be slightly jarring ... There’s something refreshing and funny about her unvarnished portrayal of human squalor, but also something unsettling and difficult to swallow. It’s not a book to reassure readers of the essential goodness of the human race; it’s a queasy jolt to our optimistic selves, a reminder of the lowest, most id-driven proclivities of humanity. This may sound unappealing, yet Moshfegh’s talent is a sheer delight ? and the heedless misbehavior of her characters is a reminder, needed now more than ever, that we’re not such an elevated species as we’d like to think, and that following our base impulses can lead us nowhere fast.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction does for the devil on your shoulder what Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels do for female friendship ... Homesick for Another World towers above Moshfegh’s previous two book-length efforts, containing multiples of the emotionality, tragedy, black comedy, pathos and genius of her previous two books combined. It is rare for an author’s collection of short fiction to have so much more power than their novel, but it is in fact the case that every story in Moshfegh’s collection packs the punch of her novel ... Her stories employ a brutalist nihilism, forcing you to follow a character into the inner depths of their self-inflicted pain. Each scene is a right hook of eloquent depravity. Each sentence is a hand-crafted bullet.

Homesick for Another World showcases her mastery with tales of a range of creeps and weirdos in despair, looking for something that will make this world more palatable to them (or vice versa). Moshfegh sympathizes with these people on the margins even as she mocks them, often suturing together comedy and tragedy in one sentence ... This cast of boors may not be the kind of folks readers would seek out to spend time with in real life. But in Moshfegh’s stories, their company is irresistible.

...most of these stories are like beautiful sculptures of unpleasant figures: You may not like the subjects, but you'll appreciate the artistry. Unlike much of contemporary short fiction, the works here don't necessarily show a protagonist with traditional literary wants. Rather, they show the protagonist as he or she is ... But for all of the pieces' assuredness, there's also a lot of repetition here...It's fine for an author to explore a theme repeatedly or, when crafting a story, to kick-start the process by inserting details he or she has used before. Some of Moshfegh's beautiful sculptures, however, have armature poking out of the clay: they're still accomplished, but you wish the stabilizers had been either removed or better concealed before exhibition. Yet the stories in Homesick for Another World are unquestionably the work of a gifted artist.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s propulsive debut fiction collection, Homesick For Another World, is populated with characters right out of this [Dirty Realism] tradition ... Moshfegh’s gritty and realistic stories feel lightly, yet eerily, untethered from reality—partially because her characters seem to view the world they occupy as if it’s different from the one that’s really there ... Moshfegh’s stories are made and broken by her characters, whose quirks—an obsession with crystal skulls, say, or a penchant for heavy drug use confined to a single town during the summer season—seem simultaneously symbolic and symptomatic of their failures ... these stories are devastating and droll in equal measures, and their characters make firm, if unsettling, impressions. The disadvantage is a sense of sameness across these stories, leading to the impression that the collection might have packed a bigger punch had it included, say, three fewer selections. This may be more of an editorial problem than a writerly one; either way, it is unavoidable. The stories are admirably thematically consistent, but at some point, the slighter pieces inevitably blur with the others because of it.

...the stories in Homesick for Another World are screamingly funny. Though cohesive in a way few collections are, the work is a polyphonic one whose author fully inhabits a range of narrators of differing ages, genders, and geographies. It is also superbly arranged, with an almost musical variation to its progression ... Not only is this collection remarkable for its engagement with the body, ingestion, elimination, intercourse, aging, darkness, and decay — the horror and beauty thereof — it appears as if in relief against a contemporary literature largely rid of such fixations ... For the reader sick of the familiar, the staid, the banal, Ottessa Moshfegh presents an otherworldly alternative.

The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh’s remarkable debut story collection, Homesick for Another World, circle one another like captive sharks in a pool. In fact, reading these 14 stories is something like a tour through an aquarium led by a deliciously mischievous guide, the kind of storyteller who delights in the salacious details of past mishaps … It’s a kind of deep cover one enters in each new story. The world outside dissolves, and these particular worlds are governed entirely by the characters’ actions and reactions, and whatever judgments a reader might pass on the lives of these lovable miscreants are lost to the force of the story’s telling … Moshfegh commits to the point of view of her characters like few writers do, or have, or can, and in so doing insists upon their humanity in ways that surprise us on every page.

The power of her stories rests partly in how many settings she can use while achieving roughly similar ends. Moshfegh's brand of conflict is agnostic to gender, nationality, and age. In her stories, we are all freighted with impulses that can undo us unless we engage them, bear down on them, and accept what they bring ... On second and third reading, these stories reveal coils of plain language and quick narratives tight as songs. What is at first urgent and disorienting becomes a hymn, improving with repetition, all of it worth memorizing.

In her short fiction, the natural way of rot and the evolutionary soundness of repulsion keep rising from and stubbing themselves on strains of desire, sometimes wily and spontaneous but mostly grimly mundane. That commitment makes Homesick for Another World nearly nauseating in one gulp, but that is not a bad thing: the sourest thing is recognizing how being let down has so much to do with oneself and the quality of one’s desire, how the sourness is compounded when one displaces that disappointment on the object of one’s desire, and how much black and weeping intimacy pools in the palm of that displacement ... That is why readers need Ottessa Moshfegh: to slip us the poison berries and get the shuddering and gagging out of our system so we can approach our desires for our home with fresh eyes.