Dorothy Allison's Books
May.01.1999
Dorothy Allison exploded onto the literary scene in 1992 with Bastard Out of Carolina, her stunning semiautobiographical story of violence and incest in a rural Southern family. In Cavedweller, Allison returns with a powerful story of indomitable women in hardscrabble situations, proving herself an expert mapper of the human heart. Delia Byrd, a former alcoholic rock-'n'-roll...
Aug.01.1995
Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family’s history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the...
Jul.01.1994
Impassioned, personal and highly intelligent, Allison’s (Bastard Out of Carolina) collection of published writings and addresses from the past decade examines issues of class and sexuality through the intricate lenses of autobiography and the literary experience. “I try to live naked in the world,” says the writer, as she blends a tender reminiscence of her mother’s death with an...
Mar.01.1993
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....
Mar.01.1991
Allison (Trash) writes poems that brim with emotion, sometimes focused and tender, but more often confused and enraged. The subject in this expanded edition of her collection of poems is Allison’s lesbianism. Although she mentions the freedoms denied her and her “sisters,” the poet ultimately seems to care little for furthering peoples’ acceptance of lesbianism. Indeed, she goes so...
Oct.01.1988
Trash, Allison’s landmark collection, laid the groundwork for her critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, the National Book Award finalist that was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “simply stunning ... a wonderful work of fiction by a major talent.” In addition to Allison’s classic stories, this new edition of Trash features "Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories,...
About Dorothy
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist...
Causes Dorothy Allison Supports
Lesbian Health Center