American · b. 1981
Ottessa Moshfegh writes about self-disgust with dark comedy. "Eileen" (2015), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a young woman working in a boys' prison in 1960s Massachusetts, hating herself and everyone around her. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" (2018) features a woman trying to sleep through the year before 9/11. Moshfegh's heroines are repellent and compelling. Her prose is precise; her vision is bleak.