LAPVONA

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

“Lapvona" flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don’t want to live in, but from which you can’t look away.” ~ The Atlantic

“The disturbing intensity of the novel hearkens to Moshfegh’s acclaimed McGlue and Eileen, but this story feels far more riotous, debauched and voracious.” ~ Washington Post

"Lapvona" is hilarious, poignant, controlled, a little nihilistic . . . Moshfegh is sui generis, head and shoulders above most of her peers . . . Moshfegh’s fictions are up to much more. They flirt with nihilism but are elegantly constructed. On the content level, they are crude, but on the aesthetic level, they are refined. The tension caused by this, the friction, is what’s special about them. It is the source of their dark sparkle.”~ Oprah Daily

“What impresses here is not so much Moshfegh’s abilities with character or narrative, or even her language . . . as the qualities "Lapvona" shares with a Francis Bacon painting: depicting in blood-red vitality, without morals or judgment, the human animal in its native chaos.” ~ The Guardian

“The edgy novelist’s new book imagines a wholly realistic medieval village rife with plagues and schemes and dastardly characters. She has crafted a trenchant allegory of life in these United States over the past several years, not coincidentally also filled with plagues and schemes and dastardly leaders. Moshfegh makes the same old story new by setting it in the past, wielding her pen like an Arcimboldian brush to sketch in the mechanics of corruption.” ~ Los Angeles Times

“The most addictive part of Lapvona is the same thing that draws readers to her other works: how she renders psychological portraits of characters that reflect our own repugnance, and therefore our humanity . . . It’s an exercise that’s compassionate as it is tactful, one in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor or Katherine Dunn, a rearranging of the world so that everyone who's not a freak is the freak . . . She’s always been good about writing about the monstrosity within all of us, and making it normal, even making it kind of fun.” ~ Nylon

“Lapvona" tells the story of a shepherd’s son who comes fatally close to the rulers of a medieval fiefdom. Moshfegh, following up on her acclaimed My Year of Rest and Relaxation continues to plumb entitlement and class; here, she adds magic and revenge.” ~ Chicago Tribune

“Lapvona is a witty, vicious novel, frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to indict all the worst habits and orientations of our contemporary. . . . Moshfegh is one of our most thrilling chroniclers of the abject — she is a delighted documentarian of all the excrescences and defilements of the body which force us to reckon with our inevitable decay, or what the French philosopher Julia Kristeva might term our future-deadness. Perhaps the great evolution at hand in Moshfegh’s ongoing corpus is the fact of Lapvona’s rather full-throated politicism. This is at heart a fable of haves and have nots, of the ways violent psychologies and apparatuses of exploitation—of the poor, of resources, of women’s bodies, of the land and earth itself—constitute a significant stratum, if not the very bedrock, of the human condition.” ~ The Observer

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".