A wonderful and affecting read.”-Rasha Madkour, Associated Press
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Gay writes of her homeland beautifully, describing it in the conflicting, nuanced way that will ring familiar to Americans whose parents hail from troubled lands. When Mireille is finally freed, her rocky adjustment harkens to that of the mother in Emma Donoghue’s Room. Perhaps Haiti, too, is a beautiful princess, well-versed in the vagaries of men, still searching for a happily ever after.” -Holly Bass, The New York Times Book Review its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great pain and high cost. Let this be the year of Roxane Gay: you’ll tear through An Untamed State, but ponder it for long after.”-Nolan Feeney, “Roxane Gay’s riveting debut, An Untamed State, captivates from its opening sentence and doesn’t let go. Mireille’s struggle to maintain a sense of self while being denied her freedom produces the novel’s most powerful chapters.” -New Yorker “These are powerful stories written with verve and there’s this great sense at the collection’s close that nothing will stop the Haitian people, the human spirit, or Roxane Gay.”-Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone on Ayiti “Gay’s characters demand respect, for themselves and for Haiti.”- Necessary Fiction A debut that feels more like a veteran.”- Monkeybicycle rests her stories between worlds, where the unrefined meet the formal, where the beauty of poetic language is never fully swept away from the dirt and grit of honest and genuine moments. Ayiti is an exciting new chapter in an old and beautiful story.”-Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory Add to their ranks Roxane Gay, a bright and shining star. Its better scribes, among them Edwidge Danticat, Franketienne, Madison Smartt Bell, Lyonel Trouillot, and Marie Vieux Chauvet, have produced some of the best literature in the world. “Haiti has long been the most interesting country in the Americas. When we make a new version of this list in five years, we imagine it will include several of her works.”- Flavorwire That’s why it’s shocking that-although this will change in 2014, when she has two books slated for publication-this incredible little collection is her only proper book to date. “There is a chance that Roxane Gay has published something great every day for the last few years. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.”- Booklist Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. “Highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments.
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This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.”- Kirkus Reviews That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman.’. This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. “A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak. an impeccably readable antidote to the patronizing news coverage Haitians have received in the past two decades.”- Village Voice “Gay’s debut short story collection features fifteen punch-you-in the-gut stories. is smart, emotional, and wholly brilliant.”- Shondaland “It’s a beautiful little book of stories that everyone should read.
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It’s Gay’s unflinching directness-the sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it is-that makes her irresistible.”- Vogue Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. “The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here.