Courtesy of Ottessa Moshfegh.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The first thing you learn about the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” published in issue no. 204 of the Review, is that she pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings. Miss Mooney is a jaded teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school, prone to showing up hungover, faking her students’ state exams, napping on the job in a sleeping bag, and offering such wisdom as: You can’t “get fat from being ejaculated into.”

None of this is remarked upon by the head of the school, the oblivious principal Mr. Kishka, whose sole observation about the narrator is incorrect. As Miss Mooney recounts at the beginning of the story:

I rarely made my way down to the school cafeteria, but when I did, the principal, Mr. Kishka, would stop me and smile broadly and say, “Here she comes, the vegetarian.” I don’t know why he thought I was a vegetarian. What I took from the cafeteria were prepackaged digits of cheese, chicken nuggets, and greasy dinner rolls.

On Wednesday, Moshfegh’s story found itself at the center of a lawsuit filed against the head of a school by a member of its faculty. The teacher in question, Vinita Prabhakar, is an English professor at South Florida State College who is suing the school for wrongful termination. As Prabhakar tells it, she assigned “Bettering Myself” to her students as part of a unit on “unlikable” narrators. Prabhakar has taught the story, alongside works from Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, “for nearly a decade without incident.”

That changed this past spring, after the college’s president, Fred Hawkins, determined that the story was “morally objectionable” (“I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this, and she’s in college”), and that teaching it was “political.” In response, Prabhakar was relieved of her teaching duties and suspended without pay. In the complaint, Professor Prabhakar recounts a conversation with President Hawkins, in which he allegedly told her, “Let me be clear: I don’t ever want to see this story again.”

We hope some of you do, which is why, this week, we’ve unlocked Moshfegh’s Plimpton Prize–winning story from the archive.

Bettering Myself
Ottessa Moshfegh

Something about that old library room made Principal Kishka keep his distance. I think he knew if he ever set foot in there, he’d be in charge of cleaning it up and getting rid of me. Most of the books were useless mismatched sets of outdated encyclopedias, Ukrainian bibles, Nancy Drew. I even found some girlie magazines, under an old map of Soviet Russia folded up in a drawer marked SISTER KOSZINSKA. One good thing I found was an old encyclopedia of worms. It was a coverless, fist-thick volume of brittle paper chipped at the corners. I tried to read it between classes when I couldn’t sleep. I tucked it into the sleeping bag with me, plied open the binding, let my eyes roll over the small, musty print. Each entry was more unbelievable than the last. There were roundworms and horseshoe worms and worms with two heads and worms with teeth like diamonds and worms as large as house cats, worms that sang like crickets or could disguise themselves as small stones or lilies or could stretch their jaws to accommodate a human baby. What is this trash they’re feeding children these days, I thought. I slept and got up and taught algebra and went back into the sleeping bag. I zipped it up over my head. I burrowed deep down and pinched my eyes closed. My head throbbed and my mouth felt like wet paper towels. When the bell rang, I got out and there was Angelika with her brown-bag lunch saying, “Miss Mooney, there’s something in my eye and that’s why I’m crying.”

From issue no. 204 (Spring 2013)