Roxane Gay

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.Feel me, see me, hear me, reach me --Peculiar benefits --Typical first year professor --To scratch, claw or grope clumsily or frantically --How to be friends with another woman --Girls, girls, girls --I once was Miss America --Garish, glorious spectacles --Not here to make friends --How we all lose --Reaching for catharsis : getting fat right (or wrong) and Diana Spechler's Skinny --The smooth surfaces of idyll --The careless language of sexual violence --What we hunger for --The illusion of safety/the safety of illusion --The spectacle of broken men --A tale of three coming out stories --Beyond the measure of men --Some jokes are funnier than others --Dear young ladies who love Chris Brown --So much they would let him beat them --Blurred lines, indeed --The trouble with Prince Charming, or, He who trespassed against us --The solace of preparing fried foods and other quaint remembrances from 1960s Mississippi : thoughts on The help --Surviving Django --Beyond the struggle narrative --The morality of Tyler Perry --The last day of a young black man --When less is more --The politics of respectability --When Twitter does what journalism cannot --The alienable rights of women --Holding out for a hero --A tale of two profiles --The racism we all carry --Tragedy, call, compassion, response --Bad feminist : take one --Bad feminist : take two

Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, 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, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and 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 delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.I will follow you --Water, all its weight --The mark of Cain --Difficult women --FLORIDA --La negra blanca --Baby arm --North country --How --Requiem for a glass heart --In the event of my father's death --Break all the way down --Bad priest --Open marriage --A pat --Best features --Bone density --I am a knife --The sacrifice of darkness --Noble things --Strange gods

Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her father’s Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a wilful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.

The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.

From New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay comes an unforgettable tale of nightmarish bureaucracy in which genetic profiling has redefined the “unfit mother.”A trip to the library prompts one woman to question her fate in this galvanizing short story. For a woman like Hadley, deemed not acceptable to procreate, there’s only one recourse. Unlicensed for motherhood, she can alleviate her grief and frustration at a “baby library,” where a curiously endless supply of infants is available for a two-week loan. But the borrowed life that serves as a temporary balm leads to a journey of self-discovery that will forever change the direction of Hadley’s future.Roxane Gay’s Graceful Burdens is part of Out of Line, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women’s empowerment and escape. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, “a strikingly fresh cultural critic” (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.

Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year’s Best American Short Stories , the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction.“I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018 , “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”

A tragic event forever bathes the world in darkness. Follow a woman and a man's powerful journey through this new landscape as they discover love, family and the true light in a world seemingly robbed of any. As they challenge the world's notions of identity, guilt and survival, they find that no matter the darkness, there remain sources of hope that can pierce the veil.

A high-stakes heist thriller about the most daring and successful thieves in three generations of women from the Banks family.For fifty years the women of the Banks family have been the most successful thieves in Chicago by following one simple never get greedy. But when the youngest Banks stumbles upon the heist of a lifetime, the potential windfall may be enough to bring three generations of thieves together for one incredible score and the chance to avenge a loved one taken too soon. From NY Times bestselling writer Roxane Gay (Hunger; Black Panther) and artist Ming Doyle (The Kitchen). "The Banks is the best kind of heist a sharp, tight robbery with escalating tensions and threats coming from every direction." - The A.V. Club "It will leave most readers smiling at the end of their journeys with the Banks family." - The Beat

A mini-collection of essays on books, reading, and the world of contemporary literature by Roxane Gay available as a limited edition, signed chapbook.(From the Independent Book Store Day 2015 catalog)

DORA MILAJE NO MORE! T'Challa betrays all of Wakanda, forcing Ayo and Aneka to make the biggest decision of their lives…

"DAWN OF THE MIDNIGHT ANGELS" CONTINUES! With their king shamed and their queen dead, Ayo and Aneka take justice into their own hands….Learn the secrets behind the events that led into the 2016 sales smash BLACK PANTHER #1!

DAWN OF THE MIDNIGHT ANGELS: CONCLUSION! Officers. Rebels. Lovers...Ayo and Aneka, a.k.a. the Midnight Angels, now have new monikers thrust upon them: Leaders.

DEATH OF A WHITE TIGER! When a down-on-his-luck New York City narcotics officer was suspended from the force, he adopted the vestments of the Black Panther to do the right thing by his neighborhood and his burgeoning family. Mentored by both T'Challa and Erik Killmonger, he became something more than the sum of his parts. That was then. Now, Kasper Cole's days as the White Tiger are behind him and he can only watch helplessly as Wakanda burns halfway around the world, leaving Kasper completely disillusioned by a leader he once looked up to. Writers TA-NEHISI COATES (Black Panther) and REMBERT BROWNE (New York Magazine, Grantland) and fan-favorite artist JOE BENNETT (who drew Kasper back in the original The Crew series!) team up to bring Kasper Cole back into the spotlight...just in time to close the door on his story forever?!

No Ordinary Love, an anthology of love stories that encourages daters to challenge the notion of “perfect fairytale beginnings” and celebrate the beautiful imperfections of real relationships. Six contemporary literary figures — Roxane Gay, R. O. Kwon, John Paul Brammer, Brontez Purnell, Isle McElroy, and Oisín Mckenna — have paired with six real-life couples who met on Hinge to interpret their experiences and explore modern romance in an 80-page zine made in collaboration with Dazed Studio.

In the early 1990s, when she first heard Aerosmith’s hit song “Janie’s Got a Gun,” about a young, sexually abused girl who gets her hands on a gun and can finally avenge herself, Roxane Gay wondered, “if I were facing a flesh and blood person with the cool of a gun’s grip against the palm of my warm hand, would I actually be able to pull the trigger?” So begins a fearless and thought-provoking meditation by a woman who has “no fondness for guns” but nonetheless owns one. Gay lays bare the facts along with her experiences, exploring the uniquely American phenomenon of contemporary gun culture; the horrifying statistics that show the scope of gun violence; the gun industry’s eagerness to target women; the Second Amendment and who is and is not served by it; and what it means to stand one’s ground.Through it all, she tries to reconcile her feminism with gun ownership and makes it clear that while she has joined the ranks of American gun owners, she is not among the converted: “If I had to give up gun ownership to make the world safer, to eradicate all gun violence, I would do so in a heartbeat. Individual rights shouldn’t supersede the greater good. Our safety should not be held hostage by political greed and indifference and impotence. The Second Amendment is not, in fact, sacrosanct—it is a law, written by flawed men, and it should be as subject to change as it is to interpretation.“A gun is a tool,” she writes, “nothing more and nothing less, but I know how to use that tool. I know how to use it quite well, and I will only get better. I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers.”

Jimmy Nolan has a thing for broads—loud, brassy women who sit with their legs open and drink beer straight from the bottle—women who always say exactly what they’re thinking and for better or worse, mean what they say.

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Kurze, herbe Stories der Ein aufregendes und radikal neues Kapitel in der haitianisch-amerikanischen Literatur.Voll emotionaler Wucht und in feinfühliger Sprache ergründen diese Stories die Komplexität haitianischer Identität. Sie erzählen von Erschütterndem und Schönem, von Humor und Härte, von Illusion und Realität. Ein Ehepaar, das mit dem Schiff in die USA entkommen will, bereitet sich darauf vor, Haiti für immer zu verlassen. Eine junge Frau umgarnt mithilfe eines Voodoo-Liebestranks einen Klassenkameraden aus Kindertagen. Eine Mutter nimmt einen Soldaten als Untermieter in ihrem Haus und in ihrem Bett auf. Und eine Frau wird auf der Flucht vor einem schrecklichen Massaker schwanger mit einer Tochter, die ihr Leben lang den Geruch von Blut in der Nase tragen soll.»Mein Wissen über meine Familiengeschichte ist lückenhaft. Wir sind die Hüterinnen von Geheimnissen. Wir sind selbst ein Geheimnis.«