Birmingham Public Library: BPL Author Spotlight: Ottessa Moshfegh

Press release from Birmingham Public Library:

Roy L. Williams

August 30, 2021

 Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981, Moshfegh published her first novel, Eileen, in 2015.  Eileen won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her subsequent novels have been in a similar style to her first, taking a first person narrative to an otherworldly dimension.  “Moshfegh’s characters tend to be amoral, frank, bleakly funny, very smart, and perverse in their motivations, in ways that destabilize the reader’s assumptions about what is ugly, what is desirable, what is permissible, and what is real” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2018).  If you are looking for an interesting read, I recommend starting with Moshfegh’s second  novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. My book review for this title is forthcoming. To find books written by Otessa Moshfegh at BPL and fellow Jefferson County Library Cooperative members, click here.  

This press release was produced by Birmingham Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.