Difficult Women [Paperback]

A national bestseller from the prolific and exceptionally insightful (Globe and Mail) Roxane Gay,Difficult Womenis a collection of stories of rare force that paints a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America.

Difficult Womentells 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 sisters 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.

Praise forDifficult Women:

The characters who inhabitDifficult Women. . . arent 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

Theres 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 . . . WithDifficult Women,l3Q