I don't have time for procrastination.

Yeah.

Welcome to literary friction on NTS.

I am Carrie Plight here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright.

Hi Octavia. Hi, Carrie. How are you doing today? I'm all right, Del. How are you? I'm good. How'd you sleep last night? I slept pretty deeply, not long enough. How about you? The same. I had to get up quite early to come into the studio today. Yeah, same here, I'm a little groggy, but I've had some coffee. Do you feel rested? Do you feel relaxed?

Well, interesting you should ask. Listen, can I just say the cheese is on the other foot today?

Yeah, you're getting, I've, maybe that won't work with our dynamic. I don't know, fuck it.

Okay, anyway.

Interesting, you should ask, because the theme of our show today is the fictional trope of rest and relaxation and how authors have explored this kind of inertia from the

tale of Rip Van Winkle to the Swiss Sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

Our theme is inspired by our guest,

the novelist Otessa Mosheg, whose brilliant new novel is called My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

In it, a privileged young woman living on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, dissatisfied with her

life, decides to embark on a year of sleep and seclusion in her apartment aided by lots

of prescription drugs and a permissive psychiatrist. Octavia, do you want to say a little bit more about Otessa? Sure, Carrie. Othessa Mosheg is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, Maglou, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. She's also the author of the short story collection Homestick for another world. Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, The New Yorker and grantor, and have earned her a Pushcut Prize, an O'Henry Award and Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize.

And her latest novel, which you just mentioned, is out now.

And it's bloody brilliant.

Yeah, we are so excited to talk to her also because she's from Massachusetts, which is where I'm from.

Carrie's big into.

And also, you guys might remember Carrie actually recommending her second novel, Eileen on the show ages ago.

Yeah, I'm a fan already, which is great.

So today we'll talk to Otesa more widely about the theme of rest and relaxation in literature.

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