Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh confines voice within self-contempt and repression, tracing how interior distortion curdles into violence.
Theme
The Body
Fiction about body image, physicality and self-perception — novels in which the body becomes a site of control, resistance and desire
Reviews filed under this theme.
The Slip
A sprawling debut about masculinity and disappearance that impresses in craft but diffuses its own emotional charge.
Muscle Man
A single day inside the mind of an embittered academic reveals how bodily obsession and grievance fuse into a closed circuit of paranoia, performance and self-surveillance.
Small Rain
Confined to a hospital room, the novel tests the body under illness and traces intimacy under strain.
What Belongs to You
A relationship shaped by money and belated knowledge exposes how shame settles in the body.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A son writes in a language his mother cannot read. Ocean Vuong’s novel examines how trauma and desire are fixed in sentences that cannot be answered.