Bad Feminist

This is the text for those of us who constructed our feminism from the pages of teen chick lit as much as from the musings of post-modern theorists. Gay gives us permission to take up the sword of feminism while laying down the shield of policed authenticity. As a result, we complete this book both more powerful and more vulnerable, just like Gay herself. How can you help but love this author?

Melissa Harris-Perry, Host MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry”
Presidential Endowed Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University

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 and 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?