Difficult Women

October 24, 2016
Gay (Bad Feminist) pens a powerful collection of short stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women. “I Will Follow You” tracks the bond of two adult sisters who refuse to live in fear after being kidnapped and assaulted as young girls. In “The Mark of Cain,” a wife pretends not to know that her abusive husband has swapped places with his kinder identical twin, who doesn’t beat her. The darkly humorous title story outlines the traits of different types of “difficult women” in flash-style vignettes. A jilted woman recovering from delivering a stillborn child finds love far from her home and past in “North Country.” And in “Break All the Way Down,” a couple learns to overcome their guilt and grief over the death of their son when they are handed a new child by a mother who can’t care for her. Whether focusing on assault survivors, single mothers, or women who drown their guilt in wine and bad boyfriends, Gay’s fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

November 1, 2016
A collection of stories unified in theme--the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves--but wide-ranging in conception and form.The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in "North Country" who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of "Are you from Detroit?" to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle "I Will Follow You." Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: "Florida" is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who's misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in "La Negra Blanca." But again, Gay isn't given to uniform indictments: "Bad Priest" is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and "Break All the Way Down" is a nuanced study of a woman's urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in "I Am a Knife" evokes the narrator's sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as "loose," "frigid," and "crazy" with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: "Requiem for a Glass Heart" is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; "The Sacrifice of Darkness" is ersatz science fiction about the sun's disappearance; "Noble Things" provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it. Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women's lives and new ways to tell their stories.

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November 1, 2016
As the title of her new collection suggests, essayist (Bad Feminist, 2014) and novelist (An Untamed State, 2014) Gay tells intimate, deep, wry tales of jaggedly dimensional women. Gay sets her stories, which have all appeared previously in a variety of publications, in many corners of the U.S., with Upper Michigan the most frequent locale. In the brilliant North Country, a woman wonders if she can survive the frigid bleakness for the two years her postdoctoral fellowship requires, and in Bone Density, a writer turns a blind eye to her respected husband's many affairs while meeting her own lover in a cabin in the woods. Some stories approach fantasy, as in Requiem for a Glass Heart, when a man called only the stone thrower loves a woman made entirely of glass, and in Noble Things, in which a couple must choose sides for the sake of their son after the second Civil War and the secession of the American South. Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay's women suffer grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Cultural force Gay, the author of both fiction (An Untamed State, an LJ Best Book) and nonfiction (the New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist), offers a group of stories whose female protagonists have challenges to surmount.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2017

New York Times best-selling writer Gay presents a collection of short stories, her second after 2011's brilliant Ayiti. (LJ 12/16)

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2016

Following her acclaimed novel, An Untamed State, Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists. One woman relishes her relationship with her husband and his twin; another forges a friendship with her deceased father's mistress; a group of professional women participate in fight clubs. The stories also include complicated men, including the priest who engages in a torrid affair with a "wild woman" but does not feel bad about it. Gay is at her best when merging vivid yet straightforward language with stories that contain an element of folklore. "Water, All Its Weight," for example, uses the imagery of water to discuss the experiences of a young woman. Another highlight is the title story, which dissects the different thoughts and responses of some women; the subheads include "How a Mother Loves," "What Happens When a Crazy Woman Snaps," and "What a Loose Woman Sees in the Mirror." VERDICT Refreshing yet intricate, in the vein of Clarence Major's Chicago Heat and Other Stories, this work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 6/25/16.]--Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016

Following her acclaimed novel, An Untamed State, Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists. One woman relishes her relationship with her husband and his twin; another forges a friendship with her deceased father's mistress; a group of professional women participate in fight clubs. The stories also include complicated men, including the priest who engages in a torrid affair with a "wild woman" but does not feel bad about it. Gay is at her best when merging vivid yet straightforward language with stories that contain an element of folklore. "Water, All Its Weight," for example, uses the imagery of water to discuss the experiences of a young woman. Another highlight is the title story, which dissects the different thoughts and responses of some women; the subheads include "How a Mother Loves," "What Happens When a Crazy Woman Snaps," and "What a Loose Woman Sees in the Mirror." VERDICT Refreshing yet intricate, in the vein of Clarence Major's Chicago Heat and Other Stories, this work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 6/25/16.]--Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.