Bad Feminist, the new collection of essays by our hero, Roxane Gay, is officially on shelves today and we’re here to share some serious bookseller love:
Julie: “From Scrabble tournaments to Sweet Valley High to the power of privilege, Roxane Gay’s essays tear open our modern world and demand we dig deeper into our cultural experience. She lays bare her own contradictions and conflicting opinions, her passions and her personal experience as an African American woman in essays that will have you laughing on one page and furious to change the world on the next. The essays in this book cover much more than feminism; they examine a range of pop culture phenomenon and the stereotypes and facades we hide behind. And they don’t let you walk away with easy answers. On top of that – the Scrabble essay is absolutely hilarious. I promise, you will laugh out loud just as often as you’ll you think long and hard about where we are, where we’re going and what your responsibility is to get us there. Read this book.”
And while we’re here, we’ll share some author love for Bad Feminist, too:
“With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist–and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.”
– Ayelet Waldman (Love and Treasure; Bad Mother)
“There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don’t know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist shows this extraordinary writer’s range–in essays about Scrabble, violence, fairy tales, race, The Hunger Games, longing, and Sweet Valley Confidential, Gay is alternately hilarious, full of righteous anger, confiding, moving: Bad Feminist is like staying up agreeing and arguing with the smartest person you ever met. Stop reading this blurb. Start reading this book.”
– Elizabeth McCracken (Thunderstruck & Other Stories)
“Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination, for humanizing the theoretical and intellectualizing the mundane, for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along. Now that she’s here, it’s impossible to imagine what we ever did without her.”
– Pam Houston (Contents May Have Shifted)
“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”
– Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be)
Two things you should know before you run out and buy this book:
1) It’s in paperback! Which means you can afford to buy two copies, one for you and one for a friend.
2) If you have not experienced Roxane Gay live tweeting an episode of Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa, you are missing our. @rgay, y’all. You’ll be happy you followed.
BookPeople 