RaveBoston ReviewPlaying with time in an act of historical interrogation, the novel rejects static racial inequity and straightforward progress alike, expressing all along a deep dissatisfaction with the supposed triumph of multiculturalism today ... More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past ... If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Long Division’s reflexiveform expresses the messy complexity of American history ... demonstrates how white supremacy in the age of establishment multiculturalism allows people of color to play, even to \'win,\' but always on its own carefully controlled terms ... The novel works imaginatively with the past to balance painfully sober material with humor and farce ... While Long Division is not defeatist, it’s not entirely hopeful either. Total optimism or pessimism would give only a partial view of history’s dialectical discontinuities. Instead, embracing the unpredictability and contingency of historical change, Long Division generously asks that we sit in the messiness a while.
Roxane Gay
RaveThe Boston ReviewGay’s Bad Feminist, a collection of essays of cultural criticism, offers a complex and multifarious feminism to answer the movement’s ongoing PR issues, its flaws and its failures. Gay’s is a feminism for the ignorant and misinformed as much as for the historically excluded and ignored … Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today … Gay presents the important distinction between the movement and the people who represent it (and who, as humans, inevitably make mistakes) … Gay’s is a liberating reclamation: a way to proudly identify as a feminist while protecting the inevitable messiness and plurality of human experience.
Jessa Crispin
PanLos Angeles Review of BooksThe issues she considers — the politics of remembrance; art and the demands of the marketplace; identity and privilege — are important ones. But she often only skims the surface, oscillating herself between memoiristic musing and moments of historical and literary analysis, in what feels in the case of the latter like a bid not to be taken for the kind of woman who writes only of her interior.
