Excerpt from Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Kill you?" I ask.

"We moved to a small apartment near the river, if you must know."

"You and your family? And your brother?"

She puts down the rubber stamp in her hand and closes the book on the counter. The sunlight through the windows falls on her face as she leans toward me.

"What do you know about my brother? What is it? Why are you asking me these questions?"

"I'm looking for Jarek Jaskolka," I say. The lady is so fat and lazy looking, it seems not to matter what I tell her. "I have to kill him."

The lady laughs and picks up her rubber stamp again. "Go right ahead," she says. "He lives up the street in the house across from the cemetery. He'll be pleased to have a visitor. You can't imagine how pleased he'll be."

"I'm going to kill him," I tell the lady. She just laughs.

"Good luck. And don't come running back here full of tears," she says. "Curious girls get what they deserve."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't listen to me."

"I will kill him dead, you know," I say. "That's why I'm curious."

"Do what you can," she says. "Now be quiet. People are trying to read."


On my way home, I walk through the cemetery, past my father's grave, and I look through the windows of what I guess is Jarek Jaskolka's house. The sun is setting, and the sky is beautiful colors and I wish Waldemar were there with me, holding my hand. "Why is it, Waldemar," I would ask him, "that when something here is so beautiful, I just want to die?"

"Because it reminds you of the other place," Waldemar would say to me. "The most beautiful place of all."

Jarek Jaskolka's house is clapboard painted cloudy green like pond water, and the windows facing the road are covered by a dark curtain. The front steps are missing, and in place of the steps there are big broken pieces of cement piled on top of one another. There are dry bushes around the house full of orange meadowlarks. I pick up a little rock and throw it at Jarek Jaskolka's window, but the glass doesn't break. The rock just makes a little ding sound against the glass. The meadowlarks start to chirp at me, whining like babies crying. I don't care. I could throw rocks at them if I wanted. I could crush them with the heel of my shoe. I wait, hiding in the bushes, waiting to see if anything will happen. Then I throw another rock. This time, Jarek Jaskolka comes to the window. I watch him pull the curtain back. His big wrinkled hand grips the dark cloth, and just for a moment, I see his face. He looks like any normal grandfather, eyes drooping, white beard, wrinkled cheeks, and a nose like a melted candle. When he moves away from the window, his fingernails tap against the glass. They are long and yellow like an ogre's. But it's clear he's just a feeble old man. It will be easy to feed him the jam, then hack him up with a knife, I figure. Old men are easy to hack. Their flesh is like an old limp carrot. But if Waldemar is right about the black hole opening up, and if Jarek Jaskolka is really my right person, then I don't have to worry about hacking him up all the way. Maybe one hack will be enough to kill him and I can just jump down into the hole and go back to the other place.

When the curtain falls back across the window, I run away, back through the cemetery, kicking at the stones that mark whatever silly people have come and gone, and I wonder where they've gone off to, if there are other places for each of us, and whether my father is really, as the woman has always told us, in a better place than this.


That night the woman is angry at me again. She wants to know what I was reading at the library. "I hope you didn't get some book that's going to fill you up with crazy notions."

"I didn't find any good books at the library," I say. "They were all boring. They were all dumb."

Excerpted from Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh. Copyright © 2017 by Ottessa Moshfegh. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.