The Paris Review

Staff Picks: Society Wives, Siege Poems, Strippers

From the first edition of Two Serious Ladies.

The other day in conversation, a friend compared Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories to the work of Jane Bowles, so out of curiosity I picked up Sadie’s old copy of and, for the first time, from the first page, felt utterly at home with Jane Bowles. Why had her fiction seemed so strange before? A phobic society wife gets dragged by her husband to Panama and ditches him for life in the red-light district; meanwhile, another rich eccentric drags her hangers-on to a crummy house on Staten Island, and starts haunting

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