OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile
Bahni Turpin crisply delivers this expansive collection of essays. Author Gay covers an array of political, feminist, and culturally charged topics. Turpin sounds like she’s giving a well-informed speech with the right inflections to emphasize specific points. Her tone is clear and deliberate, forcing one to focus on the content. As she recounts personal stories and numerous critiques of films and books, she draws listeners in with a matter-of-fact tone. Both humorous and raw moments are delivered with sharp clarity. Whether the topic is Gay’s nemesis when playing in a Scrabble championship or deconstructing rape jokes, Turpin delivers with an assertiveness that will catch listeners’ attention. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 06/30/2014
This trenchant collection assembles previously published essays and new work by cultural critic and novelist Gay (An Untamed State). Even though she loves pink, feels nostalgic about the Sweet Valley High series, and lets degrading rap lyrics blast from her car stereo, Gay is passionately committed to feminist issues, such as equal opportunity and pay and reproductive freedom. Writing about race, politics, gender, feminism, privilege, and popular media, she highlights how deeply misogyny is embedded in our culture, the careless language used to discuss sexual violence (seen in news reports of sexual assault), Hollywood’s tokenistic treatment of race, the trivialization of literature written by women, and the many ways American society fails women and African-Americans. Gay bemoans that fact that role models like Bill Cosby and Don Lemon urge African-Americans to act like ideal citizens while glossing over institutional problems in the education, social welfare, and justice system that exacerbate racism and poverty. Although Gay is aware of her privilege as a middle-class Haitian-American, she doesn’t refrain from advising inner-city students to have higher expectations. Whatever her topic, Gay’s provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
A strikingly fresh cultural critic.” — Ron Charles, Washington Post
“It’s no surprise that Roxane Gay—author, essayist and sharp observer of everything in pop culture we’re supposed to be too cool to like—has written such a winning book. . . . This best-selling collection of essays manages to be both a cultural biography and a deeply personal story of identity. At its best, the book offers Gay’s distinctive voice as both shield and a weapon against social norms just begging for examination. Perfectly imperfect, Gay is an unforgettable voice, coming at just the right time.” — NPR, Best Books of 2014
“Arresting and sensitive. . . . An author who filters every observation through her deep sense of the world as fractured, beautiful, and complex.” — Slate
“[A] touching and crucial essay collection. . . . If you’re interested in critical thinking about culture, this book is a must.” — Newsweek
“There has never been a book quite like Bad Feminist—a sometimes funny, sometimes serious pop-culture-literary-nonfiction-social-commentary hybrid written by a black woman in America. A New York Times best-seller, Bad Feminist establishes Gay as one of our foremost cultural critics and feminist thinkers.” — The Root
“Feisty, whip-smart essays on gender, sexuality, and race.” — Entertainment Weekly
“One of our sharpest new culture critics plants her flag in topics ranging from trigger warnings to Orange is the New Black in this timely collection of essays.” — O, the Oprah Magazine, 10 Titles to Pick Up Now
“Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your sharpest critic. . . . She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she is also required reading.” — Time Magazine
“A trenchant collection. . . . Whatever her topic, Gay’s provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Toss Roxane Gay’s collection of witty, thoughtful essays, Bad Feminist into your tote bag. With musings on everything from Sweet Valley High to the color pink, Gay explores the idea of being a feminist, even when you’re full of contradictions.” — Self, "Smart beach-read alert"
“Gay’s essays are consistently smart and provocative. . . . Her essay collection will give you dinner-party conversation through September.” — Jennifer Weiner's 10 best beach reads, USA Today
“An assortment of comical, yet astute essays that touch on Gay’s personal evolution as a woman, popular culture throughout the recent past, and the state of feminism today.” — Harper's Bazaar
“Roxane Gay may call herself a bad feminist but she is a badass writer. . . . Reading Bad Feminist is like having a fascinating (one-way) conversation with an extremely smart, well-read, funny and thoughtful party guest. Here’s hoping we have another encounter soon.” — Associated Press
“Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection.” — Time
“Bad Feminist collects the very good essays of ‘It girl’ culture critic Roxane Gay.” — Vanity Fair, Hot Type
“Fascinating. . . . An important and pioneering contemporary writer . . . Readers will immediately understand the appeal of Gay’s intimate and down-to-earth voice. . . . An important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics.” — Boston Globe
“Alternately friendly and provocative, wry and serious, her takes on everything from Girls to Fifty Shades of Grey help to recontextualize what feminism is—and what it can be.” — Time Out New York
“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, author of How Should a Person Be?
“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, author of Love and Treasure and Bad Mother
“Smart readers cannot afford to miss these essays, which range from socially significant art (Girls, Django in Chains) and feminist issues (abortion) to politics (Chris Brown) and why Gay likes pink.” — Library Journal
“Pre-order it, put it on the library hold list, whatever. Just get ready to read it and quote it and share it and be challenged by it.” — Book Riot
“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.” — Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck & Other Stories
“Trailblazing.” — Salon
“Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.” — Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
“She had me at Sweet Valley High. Gay playfully crosses the borders between pop culture consumer and critic, between serious academic and lighthearted sister-girl, between despair and optimism, between good and bad. . . . How can you help but love her?” — Melissa Harris-Perry, Wake Forest Professor and MSNBC host
“As Bad Feminist proves, Gay is a necessary and brave voice when it comes to figuring out all the crazy mixed messages in our mixed-up world.” — "20 New Nonfiction Books That Will Make You Smarter," Flavorwire
“Gay writes with probing intelligence about pop-culture topics from the morality of Tyler Perry to how much the Sweet Valley High books mattered to her.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Bad Feminist places pop culture under her sharp, often hilarious, always insightful microscope.” — GQ.com
“A collection of sharp, Sontag-ianly searing pieces on everything from Orange Is the New Black to likability in fiction to abortion legislation. . . . Her pieces manage to be at once conversational and full of pithy aphorisms.” — The L Magazine
“Gay is poised to hit the big time.” — Nylon Magazine
“As a feminist who has been around a while I have a message for these girls: it’s okay — you can skip the rigors of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin and go straight to Roxane Gay, where feminism is not just friendly, but more relevant than ever.” — Erika Schickel, Los Angeles Review of Books
“What’s so special about this collection is its accessibility - Gay is nothing short of a critical genius, yet every essay is approachable and open while still being thorough. Her writing is rare, and at that, not to be missed.” — Bustle
“I’m pretty sure Gay is incapable of writing anything boring. . . . Even better: It’s an essay collection, so you can parse it out, maybe save a couple for days when the Internet is particularly infuriating.” — Jezebel
“With trenchant thoughts on Sweet Valley High, The Help, abortion, and Chris Brown, Gay isn’t really a bad feminist, just an uncommonly entertaining one.” — Vulture, "8 Books You Need to Read This August"
“A meaty volume of personal essays and criticism from one of the great storytellers and smartest cultural observers out there. . . . Gay is as critical and as she is admiring. That balance is what actually makes these essays so enjoyable and honest.” — Feministing.com
“One of the liveliest, most joy-inducing books of the year. . . . Bad Feminist is a tour de force and Roxane Gay is a writer of considerable power, intelligence and moral acuity.” — Huffington Post
“A broad, compelling book. . . . It’s a book that feels like it needed to be out in the world . . . a book that feels vital, alive, and engaged with the world, and we need more writers as passionate as Roxane Gay.” — Flavorwire
“Powerful, and its winsomeness is due entirely to Gay’s fearless, inclusive and accessible prose.” — Shelf Awareness
“Read Bad Feminist to feel good about reading Vogue.” — New York Magazine, "Approval Matrix: Highbrow and Brilliant"
“Gay’s writing is thoughtful and funny, compassionate and bold, and she’s just as likely to discuss Sweet Valley High as Django Unchained or Judith Butler.” — Refinery29
“Gay’s essays expertly weld her personal experiences with broader gender trends occurring politically and in popular culture.” — Huffington Post
“What makes Bad Feminist such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Blunt and funny. . . . [Gay acknowledges] ‘I am a mass of contradictions.’ For Gay, though, these contradictions are less a condition to be remedied than a source of greater strength.” — Washington Post
“A prolific and exceptionally insightful writer. . . . Bad Feminist doesn’t show us how Gay should be, but something much better: how Roxane Gay actually is. . . . Gay unquestionably succeeds at leading us in her way.” — Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“I know there are still four and a half months left, but I’m calling it now: 2014 is the year of Roxane Gay. I just devoured her book, Bad Feminist . . . Amazing.” — Rookie
“Incisive, self-aware, risky, and often funny, the author’s writing is reminiscent of Nora Ephron’s 1975 collection of feminist essays, Crazy Salad. . . . Gay possesses a distinct perspective and singular voice.” — Library Journal
“A thoughtful and often hilarious new collection of essays.” — Chicago Tribune
“”[Gay’s] energetic and thought-provoking first essay collection will become as widely read as other generation-defining works, like Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.” — Essence
“Roxane Gay delivers sermons that read like easy conversations. Bad Feminist is an important collection of prose—prose that matters to those still trying to find their voice.” — Ebony
“Bad Feminist is often LOL funny but continuously ruthless. Its 41 essays range from book and movie reviews to political issues and, in some of the most charming pieces, Gay’s accounts of a few of her personal passions, like tournament Scrabble and the color pink and The Hunger Games.” — San Antonio Express-News
“As a culture critic, Gay has X-ray eyes. Her writing is smart and trenchant . . . She’s disarming and one of us, only smarter. She has a tumblr and she writes about Internet dating. We love her, you know?” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“Roxane Gay offers an unique (and often biting) perspective on pop culture.” — Miami Herald
“Gay offers a complex and multifarious feminism to answer the movement’s ongoing PR issues, its flaws and its failures. . . . Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today.” — Boston Review
“Rip-roaringly funny and insightful essays.” — PureWow.com
“Roxane Gay and her new book Bad Feminist are here to save us all. . . . It’s a swift read with some serious substance. . . . GET TO KNOW HER ALREADY.” — xoJane.com
“Roxane Gay’s ability to write so clearly about complex issues is truly impressive. Her essays about feminism, race, and class are hilarious, moving, and yes, educational, but never in a way that feels tired or boring.” — Cosmopolitan, "28 Life-Changing Books Every Woman Should Read"
“The book is powerful, and its winsomeness is due entirely to Gay’s fearless, inclusive and accessible prose.” — Shelf Awareness, Best Books of the Year
“Gay’s writing is as accessible as it is sharp. . . . In the volume of essays, Gay mixes the personal, the political and the pop cultural with unashamed acknowledgement that the three are interrelated and often inseparable.” — Indianapolis Business Journal
“[Gay is] hilarious. But she also confronts more difficult issues of race, sexual assault, body image, and the immigrant experience. She makes herself vulnerable and it’s refreshing.” — Tanvi Misra, Atlantic, "The Best Book I Read This Year"
“Gay’s insightful exploration of this topic makes readers worry less about their occasional shortcomings and more comfortable with being human.” — BookPage
“Entertaining and enlightening. . . . Bad Feminist is an outtake of her wisdom, and we would all do well to take heed.” — Bitch Magazine
“There has never been a book quite like Bad Feminist—a sometimes funny, sometimes serious pop-culture-literary-nonfiction-social-commentary hybrid written by a black woman in America.” — The Root
“Gay, who has become one of our most provocative essayists, leaves nothing off the table in her debut collection . . . Taken in whole, Bad Feminist is a brave affirmation of selfhood: I am a woman, this is my story, and there is power in its telling.” — Gawker, "The Best Books to Give This Holiday Season: A Bookseller's Guide"
“Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist hardly needs more praise, but no other book speaks more eloquently, or more directly, about today’s most crucial issues. . . . Gay’s essays are intimate and accessible, but broad in scope and deep in insight.” — Celeste Ng, "Writers’ favorite books of 2014," San Francisco Gate
“If you’re in the mood to read wonderful, thought-provoking essays that feel like they’re written by your best friend, check out Bad Feminist. . . . Gay puts you at ease as she shakes the foundations of what you believe.” — Buzzfeed, Sami Main, "28 Best Books by Women in 2014"
Newsweek
[A] touching and crucial essay collection. . . . If you’re interested in critical thinking about culture, this book is a must.
"Smart beach-read alert" Self
Toss Roxane Gay’s collection of witty, thoughtful essays, Bad Feminist into your tote bag. With musings on everything from Sweet Valley High to the color pink, Gay explores the idea of being a feminist, even when you’re full of contradictions.
Slate
Arresting and sensitive. . . . An author who filters every observation through her deep sense of the world as fractured, beautiful, and complex.
Ron Charles
A strikingly fresh cultural critic.
TIME Magazine
Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your sharpest critic. . . . She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she is also required reading.
the Oprah Magazine O
One of our sharpest new culture critics plants her flag in topics ranging from trigger warnings to Orange is the New Black in this timely collection of essays.
Entertainment Weekly
Feisty, whip-smart essays on gender, sexuality, and race.
Best Books of 2014 NPR
It’s no surprise that Roxane Gay—author, essayist and sharp observer of everything in pop culture we’re supposed to be too cool to like—has written such a winning book. . . . This best-selling collection of essays manages to be both a cultural biography and a deeply personal story of identity. At its best, the book offers Gay’s distinctive voice as both shield and a weapon against social norms just begging for examination. Perfectly imperfect, Gay is an unforgettable voice, coming at just the right time.
The Root
There has never been a book quite like Bad Feminist—a sometimes funny, sometimes serious pop-culture-literary-nonfiction-social-commentary hybrid written by a black woman in America. A New York Times best-seller, Bad Feminist establishes Gay as one of our foremost cultural critics and feminist thinkers.
Slate
Arresting and sensitive. . . . An author who filters every observation through her deep sense of the world as fractured, beautiful, and complex.
Newsweek
[A] touching and crucial essay collection. . . . If you’re interested in critical thinking about culture, this book is a must.
"28 Life-Changing Books Every Woman Should Read" Cosmopolitan
Roxane Gay’s ability to write so clearly about complex issues is truly impressive. Her essays about feminism, race, and class are hilarious, moving, and yes, educational, but never in a way that feels tired or boring.
SheKnows.com
Honest and warm. She takes a close, scathing look at modern music and film. . . . I believe her essay collection will open a lot of eyes and inspire women of all ages to stand and speak up.
Feministing.com
A meaty volume of personal essays and criticism from one of the great storytellers and smartest cultural observers out there. . . . Gay is as critical and as she is admiring. That balance is what actually makes these essays so enjoyable and honest.
Marie Claire
Roxane Gay applies her discerning eye to everything from Paula Deen to The Bachelor.
Vanity Fair
Bad Feminist collects the very good essays of ‘It girl’ culture critic Roxane Gay.
Elizabeth McCracken
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.
New York Magazine
Read Bad Feminist to feel good about reading Vogue.
Miami Herald
Roxane Gay offers an unique (and often biting) perspective on pop culture.
Bitch Magazine
Entertaining and enlightening. . . . Bad Feminist is an outtake of her wisdom, and we would all do well to take heed.
Indianapolis Business Journal
Gay’s writing is as accessible as it is sharp. . . . In the volume of essays, Gay mixes the personal, the political and the pop cultural with unashamed acknowledgement that the three are interrelated and often inseparable.
Refinery29
Gay’s writing is thoughtful and funny, compassionate and bold, and she’s just as likely to discuss Sweet Valley High as Django Unchained or Judith Butler.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A prolific and exceptionally insightful writer. . . . Bad Feminist doesn’t show us how Gay should be, but something much better: how Roxane Gay actually is. . . . Gay unquestionably succeeds at leading us in her way.
Harper's Bazaar
An assortment of comical, yet astute essays that touch on Gay’s personal evolution as a woman, popular culture throughout the recent past, and the state of feminism today.
Washington Post
Blunt and funny. . . . [Gay acknowledges] ‘I am a mass of contradictions.’ For Gay, though, these contradictions are less a condition to be remedied than a source of greater strength.
Essence
”[Gay’s] energetic and thought-provoking first essay collection will become as widely read as other generation-defining works, like Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.
Melissa Harris-Perry
She had me at Sweet Valley High. Gay playfully crosses the borders between pop culture consumer and critic, between serious academic and lighthearted sister-girl, between despair and optimism, between good and bad. . . . How can you help but love her?
Boston Review
Gay offers a complex and multifarious feminism to answer the movement’s ongoing PR issues, its flaws and its failures. . . . Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today.
Huffington Post
One of the liveliest, most joy-inducing books of the year. . . . Bad Feminist is a tour de force and Roxane Gay is a writer of considerable power, intelligence and moral acuity.
Sheila Heti
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.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Gay writes with probing intelligence about pop-culture topics from the morality of Tyler Perry to how much the Sweet Valley High books mattered to her.
Nylon Magazine
Gay is poised to hit the big time.
Celeste Ng
Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist hardly needs more praise, but no other book speaks more eloquently, or more directly, about today’s most crucial issues. . . . Gay’s essays are intimate and accessible, but broad in scope and deep in insight.
Rookie
I know there are still four and a half months left, but I’m calling it now: 2014 is the year of Roxane Gay. I just devoured her book, Bad Feminist . . . Amazing.
Shelf Awareness
Powerful, and its winsomeness is due entirely to Gay’s fearless, inclusive and accessible prose.
BookPage
Gay’s insightful exploration of this topic makes readers worry less about their occasional shortcomings and more comfortable with being human.
Ayelet Waldman
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.
Erika Schickel
As a feminist who has been around a while I have a message for these girls: it’s okay — you can skip the rigors of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin and go straight to Roxane Gay, where feminism is not just friendly, but more relevant than ever.
San Francisco Chronicle
What makes Bad Feminist such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy.
People
Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your sharpest critic. . . . She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she is also required reading.
GQ.com
Bad Feminist places pop culture under her sharp, often hilarious, always insightful microscope.
Book Riot
Pre-order it, put it on the library hold list, whatever. Just get ready to read it and quote it and share it and be challenged by it.
Boston Globe
Fascinating. . . . An important and pioneering contemporary writer . . . Readers will immediately understand the appeal of Gay’s intimate and down-to-earth voice. . . . An important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics.
Bustle
What’s so special about this collection is its accessibility - Gay is nothing short of a critical genius, yet every essay is approachable and open while still being thorough. Her writing is rare, and at that, not to be missed.
xoJane.com
Roxane Gay and her new book Bad Feminist are here to save us all. . . . It’s a swift read with some serious substance. . . . GET TO KNOW HER ALREADY.
Tanvi Misra
[Gay is] hilarious. But she also confronts more difficult issues of race, sexual assault, body image, and the immigrant experience. She makes herself vulnerable and it’s refreshing.
Ebony
Roxane Gay delivers sermons that read like easy conversations. Bad Feminist is an important collection of prose—prose that matters to those still trying to find their voice.
Sacramento News Review
Above all, Gay disabuses the stereotype of a humorless feminist, writing in a voice that’s fresh, funny and always accessible.
Salon
Trailblazing.
"8 Books You Need to Read This August" Vulture
With trenchant thoughts on Sweet Valley High, The Help, abortion, and Chris Brown, Gay isn’t really a bad feminist, just an uncommonly entertaining one.
Flavorwire
Bad Feminist is a broad, compelling book. . . . It’s a book that feels like it needed to be out in the world . . . a book that feels vital, alive, and engaged with the world, and we need more writers as passionate as Roxane Gay.
Pam Houston
Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.
Sami Main Buzzfeed
If you’re in the mood to read wonderful, thought-provoking essays that feel like they’re written by your best friend, check out Bad Feminist. . . . Gay puts you at ease as she shakes the foundations of what you believe.
"20 New Nonfiction Books That Will Make You Smarter
As Bad Feminist proves, Gay is a necessary and brave voice when it comes to figuring out all the crazy mixed messages in our mixed-up world.
PureWow.com
Rip-roaringly funny and insightful essays.
Jennifer Weiner's 10 best beach reads
Gay’s essays are consistently smart and provocative. . . . Her essay collection will give you dinner-party conversation through September.
Associated Press
Roxane Gay may call herself a bad feminist but she is a badass writer. . . . Reading Bad Feminist is like having a fascinating (one-way) conversation with an extremely smart, well-read, funny and thoughtful party guest. Here’s hoping we have another encounter soon.
Time
Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection.
Time Out New York
Alternately friendly and provocative, wry and serious, her takes on everything from Girls to Fifty Shades of Grey help to recontextualize what feminism is—and what it can be.
Jezebel
I’m pretty sure Gay is incapable of writing anything boring. . . . Even better: It’s an essay collection, so you can parse it out, maybe save a couple for days when the Internet is particularly infuriating.
"The Best Books to Give This Holiday Season: A Gawker
Gay, who has become one of our most provocative essayists, leaves nothing off the table in her debut collection . . . Taken in whole, Bad Feminist is a brave affirmation of selfhood: I am a woman, this is my story, and there is power in its telling.
Philadelphia Inquirer
As a culture critic, Gay has X-ray eyes. Her writing is smart and trenchant . . . She’s disarming and one of us, only smarter. She has a tumblr and she writes about Internet dating. We love her, you know?
San Antonio Express-News
Bad Feminist is often LOL funny but continuously ruthless. Its 41 essays range from book and movie reviews to political issues and, in some of the most charming pieces, Gay’s accounts of a few of her personal passions, like tournament Scrabble and the color pink and The Hunger Games.
The L Magazine
A collection of sharp, Sontag-ianly searing pieces on everything from Orange Is the New Black to likability in fiction to abortion legislation. . . . Her pieces manage to be at once conversational and full of pithy aphorisms.
Chicago Tribune
A thoughtful and often hilarious new collection of essays.
Chicago Tribune
A thoughtful and often hilarious new collection of essays.
San Francisco Chronicle
What makes Bad Feminist such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy.
Essence
”[Gay’s] energetic and thought-provoking first essay collection will become as widely read as other generation-defining works, like Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.
Washington Post
Blunt and funny. . . . [Gay acknowledges] ‘I am a mass of contradictions.’ For Gay, though, these contradictions are less a condition to be remedied than a source of greater strength.
Time
Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection.
Miami Herald
Roxane Gay offers an unique (and often biting) perspective on pop culture.
O: the Oprah Magazine
One of our sharpest new culture critics plants her flag in topics ranging from trigger warnings to Orange is the New Black in this timely collection of essays.
Associated Press Staff
Roxane Gay may call herself a bad feminist but she is a badass writer. . . . Reading Bad Feminist is like having a fascinating (one-way) conversation with an extremely smart, well-read, funny and thoughtful party guest. Here’s hoping we have another encounter soon.
Pam Houston author of Contents May Have Shifted
Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.
Library Journal
11/01/2014
Popular and prolific essayist and novelist Gay (An Untamed State) reflects on feminism, politics, and popular culture. (LJ 9/1/14)
OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile
Bahni Turpin crisply delivers this expansive collection of essays. Author Gay covers an array of political, feminist, and culturally charged topics. Turpin sounds like she’s giving a well-informed speech with the right inflections to emphasize specific points. Her tone is clear and deliberate, forcing one to focus on the content. As she recounts personal stories and numerous critiques of films and books, she draws listeners in with a matter-of-fact tone. Both humorous and raw moments are delivered with sharp clarity. Whether the topic is Gay’s nemesis when playing in a Scrabble championship or deconstructing rape jokes, Turpin delivers with an assertiveness that will catch listeners’ attention. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-06-17
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the statelyNew York Timesis complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies asThe Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’sGirls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies inFifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies likeThe Help,12 Years a SlaveorDjango Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
