McGlue: A Novella

Winner of the inaugural Fence Modern Prize in Prose
Winner of the Believer Book Award

A scion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Raymond Carver at once, Moshfegh transforms a poison into an intoxicant.   Rivka Galchen

Reads like the swashbuckledspray of a slit throat immediate, visceral, frank, unforgiving,violent, and grotesquely beautiful . . . McGlue has the urgency of short fiction married with the grandiosity of an epic at-sea classic. Los Angeles Review of Books

[Moshfegh] is a writer s writer, and one of the most multitalentednew voices to come along in years. . . . In McGlue, Moshfegh s facility with voice (here she s inhabiting that of a nineteenth-century scoundrel) competes with her ability toexpose the gritty, mucky corners of the human condition . . . Her prose is breathtaking, inventive, and electric. Bustle

"This book is not really a book; it s a prayer and a miracle. Ottessa Moshfegh is a conjurer of the highest order, and McGlue, a short novel about a person named McGlue who might be a murderer, makes me feel in love with the world, and so grateful to be alive."  Patty Yumi Contrell, author of Sorry to Disturb the Peace

A splashy new edition . . . Moshfegh's first book introduces the kind of character, in all his psychological wildness and vivid grotesquerie that her others are known for, and readers will be more than intrigued. Booklist

Moshfegh s fiction often fetishizes the repellent (vomit, blood, our capacity for callously using each other), but in time McGlue s tale acquires tenderness of a sort. That s partly thanks to Moshfegh s lyricism . . . A potent, peculiar, and hallucinatory anti-romance. Kirkus Reviews