The title story from Difficult Women, Roxane Gay’s new collection of short fiction, is a misogynist’s taxonomy of the opposite sex. On the narrator’s short list: loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, and, finally, dead girls, the most alluring of all.

“Death makes them more interesting,” writes Gay (tongue firmly in cheek, if it’s not obvious). “Death makes them more beautiful. It’s something about their bodies on display in final repose—eyes wide open, lips blue, limbs stiff, skin cold. Finally, it might be said, they are at peace.”

You likely can picture it; you’ve seen that tableau a thousand times, on television, in movies, in the news. And it’s a provocation, of course, like the notion of the “difficult woman” is, or like her predecessor, the bad feminist of Gay’s much-celebrated 2014 essay collection.

“I think women are oftentimes termed ‘difficult’ when we want too much, when we ask for too much, when we think too highly of ourselves, or have any kind of standards,” the author explains by phone. “I wanted to play with this idea that women are difficult, when in reality it’s generally the people around them who are the difficult ones.”

The dead girl is easy because she’s inert; the rest of the women in these stories are challengingly, wonderfully alive. They are carnal: Sex for them is a mysterious, sometimes dangerous balm. They have it, crave it. They become pregnant, give birth. They mother their babies and lose their babies. Many of these characters are victims of sexual assault. Others willingly court or submit to sex so rough and vicious that it’s tough to read as safe.

The violence is shocking but not manipulative, omnipresent but never the main point. The point is how these women respond to it, or, sometimes, what it’s in response to. In “Break All the Way Down,” a woman’s perverse attraction to a savagely cruel boyfriend is a distraction from the real source of her pathos: her broken love for an estranged husband and her grief over their dead child. In “I Will Follow You,” two adult sisters live aimless lives and float along into early adulthood moored only by each other. Eventually we realize that they were abducted as children, forced by a sadistic adult to do unthinkable things. The focus, though, is not on their relationship to their tormentor, but on the way their tormentor clarified and made indelible their relationship to one another.

The cover of Difficult Women by Roxane Gay Photo: Courtesy of Grove Press

Many of these stories are woven through with strands of magical realism. One narrator’s psychic pain is keen enough that she cuts through a deer carcass with a fingernail and perform an emergency Cesarean on her sister with her bare hands; another, a miner, craves light so badly that he flies to the sun; a third, a stone thrower, marries a glass woman, then cheats with someone more durable.