My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book Overview

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible

A New York Times Bestseller

"One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525522131
• ISBN13: 9780525522133
• Release Date: June 2019
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of the Millennium!

Fresh, innovative, brilliant: Moshfegh is the author of the Millennium! The prose is crystalline and precise, and she has a way of presenting characters that is hilariously insightful and dead-on accurate.

Great book but shipping not so great

Great book but my Book came covered in something sticky on the pages of the beginning of the book.

They sent me the wrong format

I ordered and payed for a hardcover and they sent me a paperback. I would like the edition I paid for.

If you are sad read this

I went into this blind and came out heartbroken. I wanted to like her so bad but she is a broken protagonist. You basically experience a year long binge of various drugs from a self obsessed rich skinny girl in Manhattan. Her friend is the only character that gave me hope. The ending crushed me although I do feel like it was predictable after a certain point. I flipped the last page expecting closure but I think the entire point is that sometimes suffering is pointless. Even when we do it to ourselves.

Right book at the right time

Took a story with a lot of suffering and made it hilarious. Funny, sarcastic, addicting; I devoured this book.

Dark Humor and amazing

The book is not for everyone, it is filled with dark humor and the book tends to stay quite stagnant throughout. There is no huge twists or turns, but rather you follow the life of a depressed it girl in NYC as she choses to take a year off to sleep through her whole life with sleeping pills. The small details makes the book ironic and enjoyable.

A wonderful Read

I purchased this book for my Modern Literature course and I fell in love with it. Moshfegh has a talent for writing awful, weird, gross characters that you love to hate, and sometimes hate to identify with. This novel is a deep look at the consumerism in the 2000s, depression, classism, feminism, and privilege. I think if I had read this outside of my course I would have missed a lot of the deeper meaning and criticism of society in the early 2000s. If I had to compare this book to something else I would consider this the female, 2000s version of American Psycho and in a lot of ways Moshfegh is creating a dialogue to Bret Easton Ellis, without a lot of the subversive misogyny. I would recommend this book to anyone.