I first came to know Ottessa Moshfegh's writing through her shrewd, darkly funny stories in the Paris Review, for which she won the Plimpton Prize. Much of her work deals in disgust (see her story "Disgust"), fixation, and the personal horrors we can't look away from.

Her new novel, Eileen, follows mousy, disturbed twenty-four-year-old Eileen Dunlop, who, like many of Moshfegh's young female protagonists, finds her small-town surroundings dull, bleak, and suffocating. By day, Eileen works in a boys' prison outside Boston and by night, she cares for her cruel, alcoholic widowed father