My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (English) Paperback

Description: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & AudibleA New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." — Entertainment Weekly "Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfeghs] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." —VogueFrom one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young womans efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.Our narrator should be happy, shouldnt she? Shes young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isnt just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. Its the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. 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, and 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. 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; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Review "I dont think Im ever going to get over Ottessa Moshfeghs My Year of Rest and Relaxation." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times"Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree. . . . Watching Moshfegh turn her withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment where everyone except the narrator seems beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree, feels like eating bright, slick candy—candy that might also poison you." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker "Darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel. . . . Moshfeghs extraordinary prose soars as it captures her characters re-engagement." —Vendela Vida, New York Times Book Review "Because this is a novel by the superabundantly talented Moshfegh—shes an American writer of Croatian and Iranian descent—we know in advance that it will be cool, strange, aloof and disciplined. The sentences will be snipped as if the writer has an extra row of teeth. . . . Moshfegh writes with so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read. She has a sleepless eye and dispenses observations as if from a toxic eyedropper. . . . Though this novel is set nearly 20 years ago, it feels current. The thought of sleeping through this particular moment in the worlds history has appeal." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times"Just finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh: caustic, funny, dark addition to the lineage of unlikeable female protagonists (by Mona Awad, Sheila Heti, Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, Emily Bronte . . . + grandmamas Lady MacBeth + Medea)" —Margaret Atwood via Twitter "The bravado in Moshfeghs comprehensive darkness makes her novels both very funny and weirdly exhilarating. . . . As in Eileen, Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable. Her confidence never flags; hers are the novels of a writer invigoratingly immune to uncertainty and self-doubt." —Slate "One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed bitcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." —Entertainment Weekly, Best Books of 2018 "A strange, exhilarating triumph. . . . Moshfegh writes with a singular wit and clarity that, on its own, would be more than enough. (Her 2015 debut, Eileen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Rest has already been optioned for film by Australian actress Margot Robbie). But the cumulative power of her narrative—and the sharp turn she takes in its last 30 pages—becomes nothing less than a revelation: sad, funny, astonishing, and unforgettable." —Entertainment Weekly "Moshfeghs tale of self-care gone off the rails is a caustically funny skewering of artistic pretension and consumption, but also a meditation on grief, privilege and social cohesion." —Huffington Post "The most exciting book of 2018 is about a girl sleeping for a year. . . . Ingenious, darkly comedic. . . . The novel speeds to the best last page of any book Ive likely ever read." —Vice "This book isnt just buzzy and maniacally entertaining—its a mean-spirited, tenderhearted masterpiece." —New York Post "My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the most poignant, vulnerable, mature, and—dare I say it?—sincere work that its gifted author has yet produced." —Boston Globe "In flat, deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill, Moshfegh portrays the vacuous interior life (she has virtually no exterior life) of a narcissistic personality simultaneously self-loathing and self-displaying. . . . My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books "Bizarrely fascinating. . . . Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness." —NPR "Its another acerbic character study from an author making a career out of bringing absurdly unlikable people to life. No one can discomfit a reader quite like her." —AV Club "One of the pleasures of reading Ottessa Moshfegh is that—unusually, these days—she rarely writes in the present tense. Instead, the sense of immediacy, the sense of being inside a character, the sense of things happening and having psychic value, both to the writer and her reader, is provided by the structure and content of her sentences. . . . One of the other pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery. All this is delivered as comic—it is comic—but its not exactly funny, though of course we laugh." —Guardian "Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfeghs] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." —Vogue "Electrifying. . . a reminder that there is something to life outside the economic exchange of time for money and money for goods, even if that unnamed thing is obscure and perplexing and just a bit monstrous—particularly as a woman. Literature may not have the all the answers, but it can show us the power and allure of saying no." —Vanity Fair "I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfeghs My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down. . . . It is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain, no matter the cause, no matter how seemingly trivial. Thats what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share." —Claire Benoit, The Paris Review "Theres a casually intimidating power to Moshfeghs writing—the deadpan frankness and softly cutting sentences—that makes any comparison feel not quite right." —Anne Diebel, London Review of Books Review Quote One of Lithubs best novels of the decade! "Darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel. . . Moshfeghs extraordinary prose soars as it captures her characters re-engagement." -- New York Times Book Review "The bravado in Moshfeghs comprehensive darkness makes her novels both very funny and weirdly exhilarating . . . As in Eileen , Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable. Her confidence never flags; hers are the novels of a writer invigoratingly immune to uncertainty and self-doubt." -- Slate "One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." -- Entertainment Weekly "Its another acerbic character study from an author making a career out of bringing absurdly unlikable people to life. No one can discomfit a reader quite like her." -- AV Club "Moshfegh is the novelist for me right now; theres such freedom and puckishness in her prose, and grandmaster technical wizardry, too." -- Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree . . . Watching Moshfegh turn her withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment where everyone except the narrator seems beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree, feels like eating bright, slick candy--candy that might also poison you." -- The New Yorker " My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a strange, exhilarating triumph . . . Moshfegh writes with a singular wit and clarity that, on its own, would be more than enough. (Her 2015 debut, Eileen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Rest has already been optioned for film by Australian actress Margot Robbie). But the cumulative power of her narrative--and the sharp turn she takes in its last 30 pages--becomes nothing less than a revelation: sad, funny, astonishing, and unforgettable." -- Entertainment Weekly "Ingenious, darkly comedic . . . . The novel speeds to the best last page of any book Ive likely ever read . . . My Year of Rest and Relaxation could easily swing into a memory-bending thriller, or a dark odyssey into the dangers of the pharmaceutical industry -- but instead Moshfegh anchors it to her premise of a girl whos simply, truly, lost -- a perfect portrait of someone who desperately wants to be asleep, in order to finally feel awake." -- Vice "This book isnt just buzzy and maniacally entertaining--its a mean-spirited, tenderhearted masterpiece." -- New York Post " My Year of Rest and Relaxation is set at the beginning of this century, but it feels so relevant to this moment, as the reader pieces together whats happening in the world while the narrator tries to sleep. Its oddly relatable, laugh-out-loud funny, and a strange treat." -- Addy Baird, Buzzfeeds Best Books Of The Decade "Moshfeghs pull-no-punches prose brilliantly captures a sense of funny-sad ennui." -O Magazine "My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the most poignant, vulnerable, mature, and--dare I say it?--sincere work that its gifted author has yet produced." -- Boston Globe "In flat, deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill, Moshfegh portrays the vacuous interior life (she has virtually no exterior life) of a narcissistic personality simultaneously self-loathing and self-displaying . . . My Year of Rest and Relaxation is laced with blackly comic interludes. Though passive to the point of virtual catatonia, the narrator cant avoid interacting with a very few other people who include a "lover" named Trevor of such astounding sexist oafishness he might have stepped out of one of the more fatuous episodes of Sex and the City : "I interpreted Trevors sadism as a satire of actual sadism." Even funnier than Trevor is a radiantly nutty therapist named Tuttle who prescribes drugs extravagantly, promiscuously, and unquestioningly, prattling away in a unique psychobabble . . . Yet My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream ." -- New York Review of Books "A darkly comic yet penetrating story about pain, destruction, and human connection . . . Moshfeghs piercing prose strips away any of the romanticism of this kind of hibernation, and the further readers (or at least, this reader) go down the young womans determined path to let go, the tighter they will feel themselves holding onto their own realities and, more specifically, everyone they love in it." -- Bustle "Rest And Relaxation Is As Sharp As Its Heroine Is Bleary . . . bizarrely fascinating . . . Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness." -- NPR "One of the pleasures of reading Ottessa Moshfegh is that - unusually, these days - she rarely writes in the present tense. Instead, the sense of immediacy, the sense of being inside a character, the sense of things happening and having psychic value, both to the writer and her reader, is provided by the structure and content of her sentences. Matter of fact, full of bravado yet always wryly observational, these stack up steadily to construct the brisk interior landscape of her third novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation . . . One of the other pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery. All this is delivered as comic - it is comic - but its not exactly funny, though of course we laugh." -- Guardian "Because this is a novel by the superabundantly talented Moshfegh -- shes an American writer of Croatian and Iranian descent with a name like that of an avant-garde London restaurant -- we know in advance that it will be cool, strange, aloof and disciplined. The sentences will be snipped as if the writer has an extra row of teeth . . . Moshfegh is an inspired literary witch doctor. She invents many of the drugs her heroine ingests, the way Don DeLillo invented Dylar, to placate the fear of death, in White Noise. These have serio-comic names like Valdignore and Prognosticrone and Maxiphenphen and Silencior. There was a joke at Rolling Stone magazine that if the drugs ran out at a party, one could find Hunter S. Thompson and suck on him. Depressives without prescriptions could lick Moshfeghs heroines elbow . . . If shes on downers, the prose in "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" is mostly on uppers. Like its narrator, this is a remorseless little machine. Moshfeghs sentences are piercing and vixenish, each one a kind of orphan. She plays interestingly with substance and illusion, with dread and solace on the installment plan. This book builds subtly toward the events of Sept. 11 . . . Moshfegh writes with so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read. She has a sleepless eye and dispenses observations as if from a toxic eyedropper . . . Though this novel is set nearly 20 years ago, it feels current. The thought of sleeping through this particular moment in the worlds history has appeal." -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfeghs] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." -- Vogue "Youll emerge from this darkly hilarious novel not necessarily rested or relaxed but more finely attuned to how delicately fraught the human condition can be." -- Marie Claire "Electrifying. . . Moshfeghs narrators final gesture, transforming herself into a piece of half-living art, echoes the odd and combative passivity of Herman Melvilles Bartleby, a scrivener who suddenly, inexplicably, refuses to perform his duties. . . . In a country that celebrates doers, such a preference is grotesque, an inversion of the American ideal of prospering through hard work. But it also serves as a reminder that there is something to life outside the economic exchange of time for money and money for goods, even if that unnamed thing is obscure and perplexing and just a bit monstrous--particularly as a woman. Literature may not have the all the answers, but it can show us the power and allure of saying no." -- Vanity Fair "I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfeghs My Year of Rest and Relaxation , and yet I could not put the book down . . . Moshfeghs protagonist is brutally dreary, and the brutality of her dreariness is often very funny, but the book is really quite serious . . . The book seems to anchor itself to "real" experiences of pain and to validate itself by their relevance . . . But it is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private& Excerpt from Book One whenever i woke up, night or day, Id shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. Id get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by. When I thought of it, I ordered delivery from the Thai restaurant across the street, or a tuna salad platter from the diner on First Avenue. Id wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments Id booked in my sleep. I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people. Early on in this phase, I had my dirty laundry picked up and clean laundry delivered once a week. It was a comfort to me to hear the torn plastic bags rustle in the draft from the living room windows. I liked catching whiffs of the fresh laundry smell while I dozed off on the sofa. But after a while, it was too much trouble to gather up all the dirty clothes and stuff them in the laundry bag. And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victorias Secret kept showing up in the mail-frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with mens pajamas and other things I couldnt remember ordering-cashmere socks, graphic T-shirts, designer jeans. I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. Id already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed "1" for "yes" when the robot asked if Id made a sincere effort to find a job. That was enough to cover the copayments on all my prescriptions, and whatever I picked up at the bodega. Plus, I had investments. My dead fathers financial advisor kept track of all that and sent me quarterly statements that I never read. I had plenty of money in my savings account, too-enough to live on for a few years as long as I didnt do anything spectacular. On top of all this, I had a high credit limit on my Visa card. I wasnt worried about money. I had started "hibernating" as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains. I didnt do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldnt stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and Id get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldnt handle it. The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega. Id quickly glance at them as I paid for my coffees. Bush versus Gore for president. Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City-they always are-but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep-reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didnt concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didnt matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldnt have worried. When I needed more pills, I ventured out to the Rite Aid three blocks away. That was always a painful passage. Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born-the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile. I relied on alcohol only on the days of these excursions-a shot of vodka before I went out and walked past all the little bistros and cafes and shops Id frequented when I was out there, pretending to live a life. Otherwise I tried to limit myself to a one-block radius around my apartment. The men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians. Besides my psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, my friend Reva, and the doormen at my building, the Egyptians were the only people I saw on a regular basis. They were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on. There must have been half a dozen of them-brothers or cousins, I assumed. Their style deterred me. They wore soccer jerseys and leather racing jackets and gold chains with crosses and played Z100 on the radio. They had absolutely no sense of humor. When Id first moved to the neighborhood, theyd been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once Id begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection. "You have something," the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later. After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me "boss" and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didnt have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee-coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didnt want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down. Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her. "You forgot I was coming over?" Reva would ask, pushing her way past me into the living room and flipping on the lights. "We talked last night, remember?" I liked to call Reva just as the Ambien was kicking in, or the Solfoton, or whatever. According to her, I only ever wanted to talk about Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg, which she said was fine. "Last night you recounted the entire plot of Frantic. And you did the scene where theyre driving in the car, with the cocaine. You went on and on." "Emmanuelle Seigner is amazing in that movie." "Thats exactly what you said last night." I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way youd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life. "Now get in the shower," Reva would say, heading into the kitchen. "Ill take out the trash." I loved Reva, but I didnt like her anymore. Wed been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses Id let Reva borrow, which shed promised to dry clean and return but never did. She worked as an executive assistant for an insurance brokerage firm in Midtown. She was an only child, a gym rat, had a blotchy red birthmark on her neck in the shape of Florida, a gum-chewing habit that gave her TMJ and breath that reeked of cinnamon and green apple candy. She liked to come over to my place, clear a space for herself on the armchair, comment on the state of the apartment, say I looked like Id lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip. "People dont understand what its like for me," she said. "They take it for granted that Im always going to be cheerful. Meanwhile, these assholes think they can go around treating everyone below them like shit. And Im supposed to giggle and look cute and send their faxes? Fuck them. Let them all go bald and burn in hell." Reva was having an affair with her boss, K Details ISBN0525522131 Author Ottessa Moshfegh Short Title MY YEAR OF REST & RELAXATION Pages 304 Language English ISBN-10 0525522131 ISBN-13 9780525522133 Format Paperback DEWEY 813.6 Year 2019 Subtitle A Novel Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-06-25 NZ Release Date 2019-06-25 US Release Date 2019-06-25 Publication Date 2019-06-25 UK Release Date 2019-06-25 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:124781976;

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