"Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity. solidifies Gay's place as one of the voices of our age." -National Post (Canada) Each story feels fresh and new, a blanket of snow you both want and don't want to muddy with a footprint. "Gay's work is as varied as women's experiences.
Gay peels it all back, exposing the raw, the enraged and the perversely beautiful." -New Republic
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deftly and terrifyingly underscores the absurdity of a society tacitly ordered by skin color and the privileges accrued by those who have ended up at the winning end, circled and watched by those who have not.
Perhaps they even live inside of our coworkers, our friends, our sisters and ourselves. "In so many ways, Gay's Difficult Women feel simultaneously fictitious and like they could (and probably do) live right down the street. "Gay's signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth make every story mesmerizingly unusual and simply unforgettable." -Harper's Bazaar Even in her fiction." -Gabourey Sidibe, The New York Times Book Review ("By the Book") Roxane Gay seems to have a knack for fearlessly telling the truth. "I'm currently reading Difficult Women, by Roxane Gay, and I'm getting my life from it. First on the level of theme-the presentation of female sexual desire, both masochistic and otherwise, is vigorous and forthright, the language refreshingly frank and graphic-then on the level of technique." -The Globe and Mail (Canada) Provocation operates on different levels in this collection. These are the places I'm going to take you, Gay seems to be saying.
"Roxane Gay, the acclaimed American essayist and novelist, charges from the gate in her debut collection of short fiction. Addictive, moving and risk-taking." -San Francisco Chronicle "Like Joyce Carol Oates' Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? or Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is fiction pressed through a sieve, leaving only the canniest truths behind. A tribute not only to difficult women, but also to the circumstances that made them that way." -BUST Magazine "The language is stark yet meaty it lives with you the way memories do, in the deepest crevices of the body and mind. Gay writes of chances missed and unexpected joy, love gone awry or resurrected, and the slivers of hope that keep these fascinating women alive." -Boston Globe "Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep. With Difficult Women, you really have no idea what's going to happen next." -New York Times Book Review It feels like the book we have been waiting for Gay to write." -Los Angeles Times "There's a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic. The stories here are myriad, inviting comparisons to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie." -Houston Chronicle They are our mothers, sisters and partners. "The characters who inhabit Difficult Women. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind.įrom a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial).