Roxane Gay is a novelist and essayist whose online essays you’ve probably had forwarded to you by someone you adore. Her writings
![Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by [Gay, Roxane]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41tjM2rqynL.jpg)
4.3 stars – 600 reviews
Kindle price: $11.99
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
![Ayiti by [Gay, Roxane]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oSCurw9TL.jpg)
4.5 stars – 64 reviews
Kindle price: $9.07
From New York Times -bestselling powerhouse Roxane Gay, Ayiti is a powerful collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. Originally published by a small press, this Grove Press paperback will make Gay’s debut widely available for the first time, including several new stories. In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. These early stories showcase Gay’s prowess as one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada).
![Difficult Women by [Gay, Roxane]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51jKW%2BjyTcL.jpg)
3.9 stars – 215 reviews
Kindle price: $9.07
The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister’s marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.
![An Untamed State: A Novel by [Gay, Roxane]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JVaSShRbL.jpg)
4.3 stars – 406 reviews
Kindle price: $9.99
Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she lives in the United States with her adoring husband and infant son, returning every summer to stay on her father’s Port-au-Prince estate. But the fairy tale ends when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, just outside the estate walls. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As her father’s standoff with the kidnappers stretches out into days, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who despises everything she represents.
![Bad Feminist: Essays by [Gay, Roxane]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41xj82w7lZL.jpg)
4.2 stars – 462 reviews
Kindle price: $12.99
In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.