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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
The New York Times -bestselling author of Bad Feminist shares a collection of stories about hardscrabble lives, passionate loves 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, Roxanne Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America with her "signature wry wit and piercing psychological depth" ( Harper's Bazaar ).
Rezensionen (6)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
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. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
A BOOK OF AMERICAN MARTYRS, by Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99.) Early in Oates's novel, Luther Dunphy, an evangelical, invokes the Lord just before shooting dead an abortion provider, Augustus Voorhees. The story chronicles the fallout of the killing for the Dunphy and Voorhees families, and even if it's soon clear whom Oates considers the martyrs to be, she examines the moral complexities of abortion from several sides. HIS FINAL BATTLE: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, by Joseph Lelyveld. (Vintage, $18.) Seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president, Roosevelt was far sicker than he let on, and perhaps knew he would not live long. Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The New York Times, reviews Roosevelt's last 16 months in office, including the Manhattan Project and the culmination of World War II. DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Roxane Gay. (Grove, $16.) For many of the characters across this collection, Gay's first book of short stories, love, sex, intimacy and violence are intertwined; in the opening tale, two sisters have forged an unbreakable bond in the hands of a predator. Our reviewer, Gemma Sieff, praised "the cryptic, claustrophobic relationships described in these pages and the strange detours that riddle Gay's imaginary landscapes." LOVE FOR SALE: Pop Music in America, by David Hajdú. (Picador, $17.) From vaudeville singers and the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem to present-day streaming services, Hajdú, a music critic for The Nation, traces the evolution of popular music over roughly the past hundred years. Weaving together his personal and critical reflections, Hajdú tries to answer a vexing set of questions: When we talk about pop music, what precisely do we mean? And does it still matter to American culture? VICTORIA, by Daisy Goodwin. (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99) Soon after her 18th birthday, Victoria ascended to the throne. Goodwin, who adapted Victoria's biography for a PBS Masterpiece drama, focuses on the young queen's life before her marriage to Albert, as she reckons with her independence and power. As our reviewer, Priya Parmar, said, this depiction of Victoria sought out "the woman she actually was." THE BRIDGE TO BRILLIANCE: How One Woman and One Community Are Inspiring the World, by Nadia Lopez with Rebecca Paley. (Penguin, $17.) Lopez runs the Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, and rose to prominence when the Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton visited her. She looks at the challenges educators face in reaching the nation's poorest children.
Guardian Review
The premises are intriguing and the language powerful, but the bestial men and masochistic women weaken these tales Roxane Gay is one of those public intellectuals who has come to represent a school of thought: in her case, a 21st-century intersectional feminism that's friendly to lipstick but against body shaming; fond of pop culture but strongly critical of its exclusionary tendencies. She is known for her fierce stance against violence towards women, and against the way fictional representations tend to normalise or even excuse it. But in her new short story collection, she is in danger of suggesting that women can find abuse both cathartic and sexually satisfying. Gay is a writer of formidable charm and intellect, with a knack for intriguing premises. She is especially masterful at writing striking openings: "My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person"; "The stone-thrower lives in a glass house with his glass family"; "My husband is a hunter. I am a knife". In many stories, this strength is sustained and magnified. "Requiem for a Glass Heart" develops into a beautiful allegory on human frailty. Another gem is "North Country", about a young academic at an isolated college who starts a relationship with a working-class local; it's meticulous in tone and detail, understated and exquisite. Where there are flaws in individual stories, they are those one would expect from someone who is by temperament a popular writer. Gay's language is powerful but sometimes careless, which can result in Fifty Shades prose, like this passage from "Noble Things": "From the beginning, they had shared something strong, something beyond anything they had ever known ... Parker loved her edge, how she could never be tamed." The dialogue can also be mechanical. In "La Negra Blanca", a woman being sexually harassed by her boss states baldly, "I need this job", before submitting to his advances; he then says to her, "Do you need a Daddy?" by which point the reader is cringing for the wrong reasons. But we're generally carried past these clumsy details by the force of Gay's narrative voice. The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks good qualities; he lacks any other qualities A peculiarity of short-story collections is that any preoccupation of the author stands out, as story after story returns to it. Here, violence against women appears in roughly half the stories. This is not unexpected; what is surprising is how it is portrayed. The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks any good qualities; he lacks any other qualities. His only feelings are belligerent insecurity and bestial lust. His female partner feels nothing for him -- not even fear or guilt. But all too often, she's with him voluntarily because she wants to be beaten. Here is the culmination of a typical scene: "He clasped my throat and squeezed harder and harder, leaving his mark ... I waited for him to punish me, and when he did, it was perfect relief." To be clear, this is a sex scene. In Difficult Women, abuse only occurs in the context of sex. Even in the stories that don't deal with abuse, sex is most satisfying to women when it leaves bruises. Occasionally, the bruising is mutual: "They wanted to hurt each other as much as they loved each other." More often, she alone is left with "fresh bruises spreading across my back, down my ass, between my thighs". If a man is gentle, his partner chides him with, "You don't have to be soft with me." Long story cut short, she's asking for it. There are only two instances in which Gay's protagonists don't appreciate violent treatment in any way. First, thankfully, the stories involving abuse of children. And in the story "La Negra Blanca", a woman who is raped is simply traumatised, as one would expect; but the story focuses so intently on the man's vile, racist sexuality and lingers so much over physical details that it still leaves an ambiguous taste. The one treatment of abuse that fully succeeds is in the final story, "Savage Gods", where the protagonist's masochism is deeply explored, and revealed to be a response to early sexual trauma. Here, the heroine's psychology is utterly convincing, and the leering pig-like characters feel magnified by emotion rather than unrealistically caricatured. This demonstrates that Gay's complex investment in this issue can produce fascinating results. But in most of the stories, the handling feels self-indulgent, even exploitative; it produces a torrid heat, but sheds no light. - Sandra Newman.
Kirkus-Rezension
A collection of stories unified in themethe struggles of women claiming independence for themselvesbut 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal-Rezension
Experienced narrator Robin Miles is the ideal proxy for Gay's difficult women, many of whom are not so much difficult as living lives that have been made difficult, onerous, or tragic by others. Embodying various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, Miles refreshes and adapts her rich voice with practiced ease from story to story. Some are complicated: identical twins who like to switch places in "The Mark of Cain"; a daughter who remembers her Saturday trips with her father "In the Event of My Father's Death." Others are horrific: a pair of preteen sisters enslaved for six weeks of sexual torture in "I Will Follow You"; the brutal gang rape of a young girl in "Strange Gods." Some resemble fairy tales-a waterlogged not-quite love story in "Water, All Its Weight-and some are numbingly tragic: the loss of a child by inciting violence in "Break All the Way Down"; silently falling victim to white privilege in "La Negra Blanca." Unrelenting, unrepentant, unflinching, Gay won't disappoint. VERDICT The bonus of Miles's vocal prowess should convince libraries to invest in these electrifying Women without delay. ["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": LJ 12/16 starred review of the Grove hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
