Razor-sharp short stories.

Moshfegh is consistently as sparky and gripping as she is inventive… She could become one of the most outstanding US writers of her generation.

The characters in this collection are an unlovely bunch but make for an irresistible read… She writes terrific, attention-grabbing openings, and impactful last lines that don’t strain for a lapidary effect. Her damaged-girl deadpan snark is second to none, but she inhabits other character types with ease.

She can really write and has a pitch-black sense of humour.

Moshfegh’s writing is cinematic – vivid, immediate.

Moshfegh’s powerful, pristine prose shines a light on the dark side of these characters […] Her endings are never happy, but they often contain hope – which can be more convincing.

Moshfegh delights in exploring the seamy underside of life… Once encountered these characters are not easily forgotten.

An impressive study of human vulnerability and self-deception, through which the reader is guided by a cynical and darkly funny literary voice.

Homesick for Another World showcases her mastery.

A perfect showcase to Moshfegh’s brilliant and sui generis mind… brilliant as was Eileen, Moshfegh is near virtuosic in short story form, and newcomers to her work would do well to begin with this collection.

Dark, confident, prickling stories… [Moshfegh] has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence… Moshfegh is a penetrating observer of class and social mores… Do not come to these stories if your own guts are easily stirred.

In her excellent first collection, Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh… 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 stories… give us a sense of watching a fluent, deeply talented artist extend herself and take risks in her quest to master the form… Magnificent examples of how a short story can become expansive beyond expectation.

Provocative… Moshfegh presents characters who evince a flinching disgust for bodily functions and human intimacy. There’s no shortage of colourful sociopaths here… The stories draw a picture of an America that has lost its way, a bigoted, insular nation in the grip of an obesity epidemic... It’s a bracing, brilliant collection.

Moshfegh’s style is a blend of nihilism and drollery that feels hyper-contemporary in its relentless sassiness, moving in the same breath from biting human observation to casual one liners about anal sex.

Efforts to contrive a sensationalist buzz around the author are not surprising. But Moshfegh needs no extra edge. Her works make enough of an impression, and they are exceptional: dark, violent and grotesquely intelligent. This new story collection, Homesick for Another World, is probably her most accomplished work to date, and it does not scrimp on obscenity, on esoteric rituals, or on harsh, uncomfortable realities… These stories paint a stunningly unique picture of contemporary disenchantment that goes beyond glassy-eyed millennial ennui.

There’s something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny… Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O’Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find… The dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating.

Moshfegh’s stories are sharp, dark and often horribly funny.

A vivid cast of women caught up in knotty social dilemmas.

Short and sharp vignettes...In all, Sittenfeld demonstrates a gift for weaving the banal into the culturally significant, making this collection a touchstone for the present day.

A true American artist ... a revelator for this still new century.

A dizzying mix of humour and near tragedy that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or weep… For too long, Denis Johnson was not sufficiently appreciated. A fine novelist and poet, as well as one of the best short story writers of his generation.

An instant classic…A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose…. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.

Like a good rock song, a typical Denis Johnson sentence describes, with total precision, what an emotion feels like … Johnson has sometimes been compared to Ernest Hemingway for his creation of a distinctive American idiom.

Denis Johnson was the best American writer of the past twenty-five years.

He was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation, if that often: a true original, in the same league as Melville and Whitman.

Here are stories that feel generously improvised but never haphazard, uncanny but earthy, reconciled to the passing of time but themselves out of time. Few books so relentlessly concerned with death feel so relentlessly alive.

Denis Johnson writes short stories like no one has ever done before. He makes the normal electric; the everyday enormous. There is not a single word here that does not hit you square in the face and say: look, this is what it's about, this is what you need to know.

Denis Johnson’s stories are astonishing… they dash between quicksilver wit and gallows humour, twinning the superficial with the profound so elegantly. His sentences are exquisite, often having the capacity to sock a sudden punch. The last story made me gasp.

[An] absorbing collection of deceptively rambling, craftily casual tales ... Magical stuff.

Sometimes streetwise and tough, and always informal, light, elegant and miraculously tender.

The late Denis Johnson is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last thirty years ... and in the posthumously published The Largess of the Sea Maiden it is blindingly clear why.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.