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3.0 

McGlue

By Ottessa Moshfegh
McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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1065 Reviews

3.0
“Initially I wasn’t sure how I felt about the story, but I ended up loving it. McGlue is a fascinating multi-layered character- he is not a good person by any means, but struggles with alcoholism that can be linked to his childhood traumas that have left him with dire mental damage. at some point in the book I started to also piece together that McGlue is a deeply closeted gay man who is without a doubt in love with his best friend, and this made the story become addicting for me. Despite the grotesque, repulsive, and dark scenes- I couldn’t stop reading. The tragedy of McGlue’s toxic homoerotic friendship with Johnson can be attributed to their homophobia, in which they were both perpetrators, and in the end, victims of. The story for me, above all else, dramatically illustrates the violence and destruction of internalized homophobia and the ending scene really solidified it for me. Such an interesting book and character!!!”
Loudly Crying Face“One of us has to go one of us said”

About Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. 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 and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

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