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. In her excellent first collection, “Homesick for Another World,” Ottessa Moshfegh, the daughter of a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, moves from the West Coast to East Coast (with a brief stop in China) and homes in on characters in states of weirdly dynamic paralysis, trapped between the pains of the past - bad childhoods, bad relationships, bad marriages - and dreams of the future. The bigger the country, the more necessary the short story form. $26.Ī talented story writer can range an immense landscape - as Chekhov did in Russia - zeroing in on precise situations of intense isolation and, story by story, drawing what seems to be a map of national character. HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD By Ottessa Moshfegh 294 pp.
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