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Dewey Decimal Number: 814.54 EAN: 9781563410444 ISBN: 1563410443 Label: Firebrand Books Manufacturer: Firebrand Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 261 Publication Date: June 28, 2005 Publisher: Firebrand Books Studio: Firebrand Books Editorial Review: Product Description: 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, and The Women Who Hate Me. 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. Related Items:      see moreAverage Rating:
 Rating: - Powerful and not to be missedNoted as "extraordinary" by the author Tee A. Corinne in her book `Courting Pleasure' and as `...exquisite, memorable erotic work...". This was the most intense reading I have done in a long time. This should be recommended reading in all colleges and universities. Tremendous titles from the author are - Bastard Out of Carolina, Trash, and The Women Who Hate Me. More information can be found at the author's web page dorothyallison dot net From the back of the book - A compelling collection of essays, autobiographical narratives, and performance pieces combines updated versions of earlier groundbreaking material with provocative new work. The author probes her experience of being a lifelong feminist activist, controversial sex radical, and a Southern expatriate writer with an attitude.. With humor, passion and enormous conviction, she addresses what it means to be queer and happy about it in a world that is still arguing about what it means to be queer. Rating: - Fabulous!"Skin" is a book of essays by the amazingly talented writer and activist, Dorothy Allison. I remember reading [...] Out of Carolina many years ago and thinking I might not get through it because of its gruesome and hideous portrayal of a poverty-stricken, incestuous family living in the South. Turns out that book was Allison's fictionalized account of her childhood. Skin, however, is a finely crafted series of essays with titles ranging from "Gun Crazy" to "The Theory and Practice of the Strap-on Dildo" to "Believing in Literature". She likes to talk about everything people aren't supposed to talk about, including masturbating to science fiction novels, the pain of catching a venereal disease from her stepfather when she was a child (a disease that went untreated, rendering her sterile), the thrill of S & M, butch/femme strap-on sex, and much more just as juicy. Allison's style is fearlessly intimate and unashamed. Her long struggle to escape poverty and find a voice is evident in every page, and in every page her voice is beautiful, loud, and resiliant. Rating: - Essays on class, racism, sexuality, and literatureThe extraordinary Dorothy Allison can write fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essays. Skin is her contribution to the essay genre, a collection of two dozen bits of astute rambling across a crazy quilt of subjects stitched together by the fierce honesty her readers have come to expect from all of her writing. Coming from a poor white trash family in South Carolina, she traveled beyond her origins thanks to a rampant intelligence that nothing could dull. A feminist before the word was invented, Allison is also a proud card-carrying lesbian, a writer, mentor, teacher, lecturer, and a woman who is always generous to other writers. Skin deals more explicitly and in greater depth with erotica and sexuality than her other works, so readers would do well to be forewarned. But if you're a Dorothy Allison fan, this is NOT a book to be missed. Rating: - A book about SEX!An opportunity to get thinking about a few "difficult" subjects, while enjoying a few refreshing lines of thought as well as a no-nonense yet witty style.Being a woman, gay or poor not a requisite, although it might help. If you're neither of the three, buy the book anyway, you might learn something (I did). Rating: - Words flew off the page and wrapped around my soul.Not since Andrea Dworkin's "Woman Hating" (that I read in 1978) have I been so moved by the truth of another writer that I would want to emulate it. In sharing Harris's vision of writing as an "uncompromising revolutionary act" the point is made that the mainstream literary world as well as the "so-called avant-garde and burgeoning feminist critical aristocracy" will not appreciate the lesbian writer who "refuses to obey the rules." To both women, nothing is more important than telling the truth, "refusing all categories, all who would shape your writing to their own use." "Yes!" I cried, " The End. |
