Works by
Dorothy Allison
(Writer)
[April 11, 1949 - ]

Non-fiction

• Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature (1994) -- Winner 1994 Lambda Literary Award for GLBT Studies (Lesbian Studies); Winner 1995 American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award.
  A fantastic collection of essays, autobiographical narratives, and performance pieces, including updated versions of earlier groundbreaking material with provocative new work by the lifelong feminist activist, controversial sex radical, and Southern expatriate writer with an attitude who brought us Bastard Out of Carolina, Trash: Stories, and The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry 1980-1990. Funny, passionate, and compelling prose on what it means to be queer and happy about it in a world that is still arguing about what it means to be queer.

Fiction

• Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) -- Finalist for the 1992 National Book Award
  Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family—rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Observing everything with the mercilessly keen eye of a child, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney. Her stepfather, Daddy Glen, calls Bone "cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty," yet Anney needs Glen. At first gentle with Bone, Daddy Glen becomes steadily colder and more furious—until their final, harrowing encounter, from which there can be no turning back.

• Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)
  Dorothy Allison talks about her life, her sexuality, her poor background and about how she conquered her disadvantages. Her life has been a triumph over family violence, alcoholism, sexual abuse and lack of education.

• Cavedweller (1998) - Winner, 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
  When Delia Byrd packs her car and begins the long trip home from Los Angeles-from the glamour of the rock 'n roll business, her passion for singing and songwriting, and the darker days of whisky and violence and too much belief in the promises of a man she loved-she heads to Cairo, Georgia, and her own unresolved past. Ten years earlier, Delia left the husband who turned on her, abandoned her two daughters, one an infant, and fled to California. But Delia is pulled back to Georgia: to a world of convenience stores and biscuit factories, kudzu and deep-rooted Baptism-to make a deal with the man she paid a high price to leave. She brings her third daughter, Cissy, with her. And as the lives of Delia, Cissy, Amanda, and Dede converge, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that brings all four women to terms with themselves and with one another. Told in the incantatory and unforgettable voice of one of America's greatest storytellers, Cavedweller is a sweeping novel of the human spirit that maps a world of "lost" and "known" caves, the unexplored recesses of the heart, and the lives of four women at a place where violence, and what redeems it, intersect.

• She Who (In Progress)

Poetry

• The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry 1980-1990 (1983)

Short Stories

• Trash: Stories (1988) -- Winner, 1988 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and co-winner of the 1988 Lambda Literary Award for Small Presses (Lesbian)
  Showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of storytelling.

See also:

• Critical Essays On The Works Of American Author Dorothy Allison (2005), Christine Blouch and Laurie Vickroy, eds.