In the second installment of BwogBooks, a series focused on CU authors, staff writer Maren Frey reviews Homesick for Another World by Barnard alum, Otessa Moshfegh!

While many people love Barnard alum Ottessa Moshfegh for her acclaimed New York Times Best Seller, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, my all-time favorite of her books is her collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World. Composed of many psychological thriller stories, the book was named a “2017 New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year” and many of the stories appeared in both The Paris Gazette and The New Yorker prior to the book’s publication. Highlighting themes of longing and originality and ranging from science fiction to misery-lit, in my opinion there is truly no better contemporary short story collection than this one. 

Majoring in English, the author, Ottessa Moshfegh (BC ’02) has experienced all the classics of Morningside Heights life that we all know too well. In her novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” she writes about West Side Market and Koronet’s “cheap pizza by the slice,” (even though the price of the slices has risen significantly since the early 2000s). 

However, Homesick for Another World’s settings are much further from Morningside Heights. The fourteen short stories are based all over the world, from Los Angeles to a fictional Scandinavian town, attesting to Moshfegh’s diverse range of storytelling. 

Many of the stories touch on betrayal and the disgust one feels with such, both emotionally and physically. In the story, “The Beach Boy,” the theme of fetish is on full display when a husband goes on vacation and ends up fantasizing about his late wife’s assumed cheating with male prostitutes on the same beachfront he occupies. 

Obsession is also a common theme in Homesick for Another World, such as in the story “Dancing in the Moonlight,” when a broke young man becomes obsessed with a young furniture designer and begins to manipulate her in a ploy to get her attention. 

Beauty follows the trend of obsession in “The Surrogate,” where a white woman works as a fake vice-president for an Asian-American family and becomes intertwined with their life. But Stephanie struggles with self-consciousness in connection to a pituitary problem that causes her body’s inflammation. 

However, my personal favorite story is “The Weirdos,” which focuses on a young woman who hates her boyfriend, who lives in the apartment complex where he is the manager. She meets two tenants of the apartment who come bearing ominous gifts. 

Homesick for Another World truly touches on the themes of the complexities and disgusts of the painful world that occupies human conditions. Through her writing, Moshfegh begs us to hope for a world feel from the terrors in her writing. 

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Moshfegh via Wikimedia Commons