McGlue

Published by a small press in 2014, this debut novella from critical darling Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018) gets a splashy new edition following the success of her recent books. Off the coast of Zanzibar in 1851, a young man called McGlue comes to as he's rustled below deck. He killed his best friend, his shipmates say, but McGlue remains skeptical and awaits Johnson's return. Sick without drink, and sometimes sick with it, McGlue writhes in the bed he's chained to and terrorizes everyone, including himself. Delivered home to Salem, Massachusetts, McGlue awaits trial and dries out in jail, unraveling the tragic youth he remembers more clearly than he does what happened with Johnson, perhaps his life's sole source of tenderness. He hallucinates figures made of smoke and remembers the friend who nurtured him and fed his addiction, and was almost certainly even more than that. 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. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.

A man held in the drunk tank in 1851 Salem, Massachusetts, tries to get sober enough to remember whether or not he killed his best friend. By the award-winning author of Eileen. Original.

Accused of murdering his friend, Johnson, McGlue struggles to remember what happened on that drunken night.

The debut novella from one of contemporary fiction's most exciting young voices, now in a new edition.Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.