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Staff Pick
This is an unusual character study with an unreliable narrator, so it's perplexing as well as extremely weird. McGlue is a sailor who works the ships with his best friend, Johnson, until a murder stops him in his tracks. McGlue is sort of awful (chronically drunk, as well), but I couldn't put this tiny book down (even when I wanted to) until I was finished. There is something so compelling in Moshfegh's work, and this is her first published novel, so it's interesting to see how her work has changed. Something about the way she writes just keeps me absolutely rapt with attention. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Newly reissued for a wider audience, Ottessa Moshfegh's first literary outing ventures into the fractured psyche of a drunken sailor, McGlue, who stands accused of murdering his best friend. You'd never read about McGlue in any history book, but Moshfegh lends dignity to his sad story. A must-read for fans of the author and a strange, standout work in its own right. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The debut from one of contemporary fiction’s most exciting young voices, now in a new edition.
Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation — he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.
They said I’ve done something wrong?…And they’ve just left me down here to starve. They’ll see this inanition and be so damned they’ll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them…: the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I’ll pat their heads and nod. I’ll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.
Review
"A potent, peculiar, and hallucinatory anti-romance." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"In McGlue, Moshfegh's facility with voice (here she's inhabiting that of a nineteenth-century scoundrel) competes with her ability to expose the gritty, mucky corners of the human condition . . . Her prose is breathtaking, inventive, and electric." Bustle
Review
“Strange and beautiful…Moshfegh’s debut heralds the arrival of an unforgettable new American voice.” Los Angeles Times
Review
“Short-fiction genius Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel is a gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur.” Gary Lutz
About the Author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award.