A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. 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. 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. 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. “Award-winning author and livewire talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with the widely acclaimed novel An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist ( Harper Perennial). BOTTOM LINE: An absolute must-read and a perfect first book for 2017
