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My Year of Rest and Relaxation Audiobook
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(2.50) - 2 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
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 their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly “Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
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“Narrator Julia Whelan lures listeners into the prescription drug-enhanced fog in which the unnamed protagonist of this audiobook seeks temporary refuge…Whelan’s characterizations are perfection: a detached, sometimes languishing voice for the woman; a perky, high voice for the friend; and distracted confusion for the doctor. The woman’s pursuit of hibernation as a means of escape and healing is not without humor, which Whelan perfectly nails with an understated delivery. Sharp observations about New York City round out the story. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
Quotes
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“Darkly hilarious…[Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.”
— Vogue -
“You’ll emerge from this darkly hilarious novel not necessarily rested or relaxed but more finely attuned to how delicately fraught the human condition can be.”
— Marie Claire -
“Darkly comic…Moshfegh’s extraordinary prose soars as it captures her character’s re-engagement.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation is as sharp as its heroine is bleary…Bizarrely fascinating…Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination and bleakness into surprising tenderness.”
— NPR -
“A darkly comic yet penetrating story about pain, destruction, and human connection.”
— Bustle -
“Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author…A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Awards
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A Paris Review Selection
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An Amazon Best Book of the Month selection
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice of the Week
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A New York Times bestseller
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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Longlisted for the 2019 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
My Year of Rest and Relaxation Listener Reviews
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Tom Goodin, 3/27/2021
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kim topping, 6/9/2020
About Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer whose first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. 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. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, New Yorker, and Granta and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Julia Whelan
Julia Whelan is a novelist, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and multiple award-winning audiobook narrator. She graduated with a degree in English and creative writing from Middlebury College and Oxford University. She is a former child actor who has appeared in multiple films and television shows.