Hear and learn more about the musical memories in If We Were Electric. Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger.Martin Pousson, author of No Place, Louisiana and Black Sheep Boy.Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories and Oral Tradition.If We Were Electric video excerpt, 4 minutes Where It Takes Us video excerpt, 4 minutes This time, her newest release, 'Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, shows a raw side of her. “dangerous, heartwrenching stories” - Jim Gladstone Smart and fierce when it comes to issues of race and gender, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay is back with another hit.“addictively gorgeous and mesmerizing” - Jim Piechota.“an incredibly light, powerful, and majestic sense of what it means to be human” - Martin Pousson.And “Where It Takes Us” is a poignant, understated snapshot of a gay man who accompanies his straight, HIV-positive brother to the race track to bond again. The teenage narrator in “Before Las Blancas” is so overwhelmed by his sexuality that he abandons everything and everyone he’s known to live in a happy illusion … in Mexico. “Blackout” sets the profound numbness of a young man physically abused by his mentally unstable partner beside the meaningful beauty of an unexpected moment of joy with someone else. An exploding transformer’s raw, unnerving energy in the title story matches the strange, ferocious temper of an unlucky hustler. In “ Feux Follet,” an old man’s grief attracts supernatural lights in the dark Louisiana swamps.
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These are stories about missed opportunities, about people on the outside who don’t fit in, about the consequences of not mustering enough courage to overcome the binds. The stunning debut collection finds its characters in moments of desire and despair, often stuck on the verge of a great metamorphosis, but burdened by some unreasonable love. Twelve stories celebrate New Orleans in all of its beautiful peculiarities: macabre and magical, muddy and exquisite, sensual and spiritual. 2019 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction About If We Were Electric