And if all the chatter makes you want to dive into Gay's work, here are some fantastic essays and stories by the writer you can read now, for free, to convince you why you should be a Roxane Gay fangirl, too.Ī brief and quietly devastating story about a kid named Gérard who moves to America from Haiti. For those who've followed her through Twitter and Tumblr - digital treasure troves where she'll share lyrical spare thoughts, eviscerate racist Best Buy employees, or just narrate a Barefoot Contessa episode - the publication of both of her books is cause for massive celebration.īut don't listen to me - listen to absolutely everyone talking about her, aka the entire Internet. As Gay told The Great Discontent, she started to publish her work 'very carefully' in literary journals in the late '90s.
Her first novel, An Untamed State, was published by Grove Atlantic in May, and her essay collection Bad Feminist has just been released by Harper Perennial (it happens to be our August Book of the Month, by the way), and they are both exceeding every ridiculously high expectation set for them.īut what may seem like overnight success is actually the product of decades of writing. This summer has been the summer of Roxane Gay, and the world is the better for it.
