Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Eileen | 2015 |
| My Year of Rest and Relaxation | 2018 |
| Death in Her Hands | 2020 |
| Lapvona | 2022 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| McGlue | 2014 |
| My New Novel | 2021 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Homesick for Another World | 2017 |
About Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist and screenwriter, born in Boston in 1981. Her first novel, “Eileen” (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and she has since published “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, “Death in Her Hands” and “Lapvona”.
Moshfegh was raised in Boston by a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, both musicians who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music, and she learned piano and clarinet as a child. She attended the Commonwealth School and took a degree in English at Barnard College in 2002. After college she taught English in China and worked in a punk bar, then moved to New York, where she worked for Overlook Press. She completed an MFA at Brown University in 2011 and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015.
Her first book was the novella “McGlue” (2014), the first winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. She has published a number of stories in The Paris Review, which gave her its Plimpton Prize in 2013. In “Eileen”, the narrator looks back on her youth in a Massachusetts town she calls X-ville, where she worked as a secretary at a juvenile prison and cared for her father, a retired police officer and an alcoholic, and on the events that led her to leave.
The story collection “Homesick for Another World” (2017) was a finalist for The Story Prize. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018) is about a young art history graduate in New York in 2000 who gives up her gallery job and sets out to sleep for a year, with the help of pills from a dubious psychiatrist. “Death in Her Hands” followed in 2020. “Lapvona” (2022) is set in a fictional medieval fiefdom and follows Marek, the abused son of a shepherd. All three novels were New York Times bestsellers.
Moshfegh also writes for the screen. She co-wrote the 2022 film “Causeway” and, with Luke Goebel, the 2023 film adaptation of “Eileen”. Her short story “My New Novel” was published in 2021 as an art book with a foldout painting by Issy Wood. She lives in Southern California.
Photo: Kelly Writers House, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).