- New Arrivals
Fiction- Historical FictionCrime & ThrillersMysteryScience-FictionFantasyPoetryRomanceChildren’s BooksYoung Adult
- Biographies & MemoirsHistoryCurrent AffairsTech & ScienceBusinessSelf-DevelopmentTravelThe ArtsFood & WineReligion & SpiritualitySportsHumor
ListsGift CardsWhat To ReadMy ListsGames- About & Help
- About Tertulia
- Membership & Co-Ownership
- Shipping & Delivery
- Orders & Payments
- Contact Support
- Send App Feedback
- Follow us
- Download the app
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Difficult Women
Reader Score
79%
79% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 17 reviews on
Well-Read Black Girl Book Club
A national bestseller from the "prolific and exceptionally insightful" (Globe and Mail) Roxane Gay, Difficult Women is a collection of stories of rare force that paints a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America.
Difficult Women tells 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 have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and, grown now, 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 gives voice to a chorus of unforgettable women in a scintillating collection reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Anne Enright, and Miranda July.
Book Details
- Publisher: Grove Press
- Publish Date: Nov 14th, 2017
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 1.10in - 0.64lb
- EAN: 9780802127372
- Categories: • Short Stories (single author)• Literary• African American & Black - Women
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.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
Praise for Difficult Women:
"The characters who inhabit Difficult Women . . . aren't just characters. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. They are human. They are us." -USA Today (4/4 stars)
"Sharp, poignant and daring . . . The stories here are myriad, inviting comparisons to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie." --Houston Chronicle
"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 . . . It feels like the book we have been waiting for Gay to write." --Los Angeles Times
"Gay has fun with these ladies . . . With Difficult Women, you really have no idea what's going to happen next." --New York Times Book Review
"Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep . . . 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
"The language is stark yet meaty; it lives with you the way memories do, in the deepest crevices of the body and mind . . . powerful." --Arizona Daily Sun
"A master of the short story . . . A tribute not only to difficult women, but also to the circumstances that made them that way." --BUST Magazine
"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 . . . Addictive, moving and risk-taking." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Roxane Gay, the acclaimed American essayist and novelist, charges from the gate in her debut collection of short fiction . . . These are the places I'm going to take you, Gay seems to be saying. Are you prepared? . . . Provocation operates on different levels in this collection. 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)
"I'm currently reading Difficult Women, by Roxane Gay, and I'm getting my life from it . . . Roxane Gay seems to have a knack for fearlessly telling the truth. Even in her fiction." --Gabourey Sidibe, The New York Times Book Review ("By the Book")
"Gay's signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth make every story mesmerizingly unusual and simply unforgettable." --Harper's Bazaar
"In so many ways, Gay's Difficult Women feel simultaneously fictitious and like they could (and probably do) live right down the street. Perhaps they even live inside of our coworkers, our friends, our sisters and ourselves . . . Gay's writing is unparalleled." --Forbes
"Difficult Women . . . 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, ...