McGlue: A Novella

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O'Shaughnessy and Robert Gregory believed a 68-year-old man visiting a supermarket petrol station would be an easy target. Geyh, M.A., Grosjean, M., Núñez, L. & Schotterer, U. ( 1999) Radiocarbon reservoir effect and the timing of the late-glacial/early Holocene humid phase in the Atacama Desert (northern Chile). Quatern. Res., 52, 143– 153.

Blard, P.-H., Sylvestre, F., Tripati, A.K., Claude, C., Causse, C., Coudrain, A., Condom, T., Seidel, J.-L., Vimeux, F., Moreau, C., Dumoulin, J.-P. & Lavé, J. ( 2011) Lake highstands on the Altiplano (Tropical Andes) contemporaneous with Heinrich 1 and the Younger Dryas: new insights from 14C, U–Th dating and δ18O of carbonates. Quatern. Sci. Rev., 30, 3973– 3989. Smoot, J.P. & Lowenstein, T.K. ( 1991) Depositional environments of non-marine evaporites. In: Evaporites, Petroleum and Mineral Resources (Ed by J.L. Melvin), Dev. Sedimentol., 50, 189– 347.Cohen, A.S. ( 2003) Paleolimnology. The History and Evolution of Lake Systems. Oxford University Press, New York.

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A sextant of the psyche, McGlue works its grand knowing through the mouthfeel of language; it’s a sharply intelligent, beautiful, and singular novel. A scion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Raymond Carver at once, Moshfegh transforms a poison into an intoxicant.” RIVKA GALCHEN Kim: I hadn’t thought of this novel as a movie but now that we are puzzling it out, seems like a perfect intense film. As a child she was “very well-behaved”, she says. “Very quiet and very, very observant.” But she was always bothered by the same question: “Why did I feel like such a weirdo?” The answer she has arrived at is a knotty combination of her unusual ancestry and upbringing. The middle child of an Iranian father and Croatian mother, both professional violinists (they met at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels) who fled Tehran at the outbreak of the Iranian revolution, she was always “acutely aware” of her troubled heritage, in a way that had “zero place” in the suburban America of the 1980s. “It was a lot to take on as a child, growing up in a country whose culture your parents don’t know,” she says, “and they were still recovering from all of the shit that happened to them, which was horrifying and unexpected, and everything that happened to their parents.” Pietras, J.T. & Carroll, A.R. ( 2006) High-resolution stratigraphy of an underfilled lake basin: Wilkins Peak Member, Eocene Green River Formation, Wyoming, U.S.A. J. Sed. Res., 76, 1197– 1214.

Ottessa Moshfegh:Good questions, Michelle. He has a confrontation with Johnson in which they get emotional and start making out and in the passion McGlue stabs Johnson to death. A dynamic and wonderfully mercurial writer, Ottessa Moshfegh has defied ideas of genre, appropriate subject matter and character “likability” to create sui generis award-winning work. From the filthy restlessness of her debut McGlue through the Booker-shortlisted Eileento the witty and pointed social commentary of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh’s prose, voice and execution have been remarkable. It’s for this reason that her latest, Death in Her Hands, seems a disappointment, unable to reach those prior heights. Some signature Moshfegh moments remain, but in general the book simmers for a while and then fizzles out. However, when given the chance to see his grandchildren last November, he absconded, just three months before his sentence ended. Brian S: Also, knowing what the alcohol of the day did to humans helped me have some empathy for him. Zaleha, M. ( 2006) Sevier orogenesis and nonmarine basin filling: implications of new stratigraphic correlations of Lower Cretaceous strata throughout Wyoming, USA. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull., 118, 886– 896.

Brian, what you wrote about alcohol in the day is fun. I liked reading that “Mad as a hatter” was an expression that came from the fact that the glue they used to make hats gave people brain damage.