Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

From The Paris Review Plimpton Prize-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh comes Eileen, a mordant and harrowing story of obsession and suspense

My name was Eileen Dunlop. This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker and a secretary at the Moorehead boys’ prison. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city, and fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting and stalking a prison guard named Randy. When the bright and beautiful Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, introducing one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.

Story Locale: Outside Boston in the early 60s

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize for her stories in The Paris Review, and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford.

Author Residence: Oakland, CA

Author Hometown: Boston, MA