Difficult Women (Hardcover)

Difficult Women By Roxane Gay Cover Image
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January 2017 Indie Next List


“A 'difficult woman' has become shorthand for one who speaks her mind, who questions patriarchal power, and who refuses to be defined by a standard of femininity. The women who populate Gay's story collection are all difficult in their own ways -- mothers, sisters, lovers, some married and some single, most of flesh and one of glass -- yet they are all searching for understanding, for identity, and for ways to make sense of a sometimes nonsensical, cruel world. Some of Gay's stories are graphic, some are allegorical, and all are important commentaries on what being female looks and feels like in modern America.”
— Bex Gilmer (W), Bloomsbury Books, Ashland, OR

Description


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). 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.

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. 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. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. 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.

From 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.

About the Author


ROXANE GAY is also the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Hunger; the story collection Difficult Women; the novel An Untamed State, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the essay collection Bad Feminist; and several comic books in Marvel's Black Panther: World of Wakanda series. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors. She divides her time between Indiana and Los Angeles.


Coverage from NPR



Product Details
ISBN: 9780802125392
ISBN-10: 0802125395
Publisher: Grove Press
Publication Date: January 3rd, 2017
Pages: 272
Language: English