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, ...
