![]() Although her stories play with form, diving into realism, magic realism, speculative, noir and experimental fiction, unimpeachable narration leaves a reader believing. She takes a reasonable tone to convey erotic, graphic and wry observations about the ways people try to love each other. What binds Roxane Gay’s 21 short stories in Difficult Women is that they are told with direct, plainspoken intimacy - the same voice that makes her personal essays so compulsively readable. ![]() The very short, 'flash' stories can collapse a little under the weight of the one idea or line that birthed them. The longer stories are almost always the most successful managing to balance clever concepts with a more languid reveal. The scenes of sexual violence feel relevant, raw and true to life. The stories are frequently about sex or rape but are not titillating or gratuitous they are harrowing and unflinching. ![]() 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, although the majority of them have some element of magic or the surreal at play. These short stories have given Gay’s writing and ideas a way to transcend boundaries in a way Bad Feminist couldn’t and reveal her to be a writer as interested in form and language as she is in social commentary. Roxane Gay is razor sharp on the constant contradictions of being a woman - the terrible mundanity and the terrible violence of it all, and the way these two things rub up against each other so fondly. ![]()
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