Retro 4 is the latest collection of the best, the funniest, the strangest, and the most affecting stories from the award winning literary magazine, Joyland.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes--a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels...

Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys' prison, Eileen Dunlop tempers her days with dreams of escaping to the big city. When Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new prison counsellor, Eileen affection for Rebecca will pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.

They said I've done something wrong?... And they've just left me down here to starve. Haven't had a drop in days more so... Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name or situation or orientation - he may have killed a man.

There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious.