Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes--a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen's story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.

From the Hardcover edition.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her short stories have appeared in Fence, Noon, Vice, The Paris Review, and various other literary magazines and online journals. Last year she was awarded the Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in The Paris Review, and the Modern Prize in Prose given by Fence Books, who will be publishing her first novel, McGlue, in November, 2014. She was recently granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Holding a BA in English from Barnard College and an MFA in creative writing from Brown, she is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, at work on a new novel and a collection of short stories, and lives in Oakland, California.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781594206627
ISBN 10	1594206627
Title	Eileen
Author	Ottessa Moshfegh
Condition	Unavailable
Binding type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2015-08-18
Number of pages	272
Prizes	Commended for National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) 2015
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable