Might be my favorite book of short stories ever. ( )

Another musty, wrinkled closet find discovered at my secret bunker in the Puerto Rican mountain jungle, this book's voice rose up to join the incessant calling of the coquís and the maniacal chuckling of the screech owl. I welcomed this voice inside me, where she built a makeshift shotgun shack and set to telling her stories. Allison grew up in South Carolina, where I used to live, though she lived in a much different part of the state. Her family was large and poor and members of it died with alarming frequency, often while quite young and under gruesome circumstances. She got the hell out of there and didn't much look back, except to tell the truth of it all. Someone had to. There is violence here, not violence for the sake of violence, but violence that shapes a person, violence that demands to be shouted out with the words that tell us what some are afraid to know, yet need to know, words that describe the shadow that is senseless to turn away from, for it follows all of us. There is also passion and lust, a grappling with all of life as a fierce light burns in her eyes. It's real, it's true, it's her life and she wants to tell it to you. (Okay, technically it's fiction, but read the preface and you'll understand).

"All I had known was that I had to get away from them—all of them—the men who could do those terrible things and the women who would let it happen to you. I'd never forgiven any of them." ( )

it doesn't get better than dorothy allison. more than anyone else, she makes me want to be a writer. ( )

Highly graphic, audacious and twisted, this book of short stories is the precursor to Bastard out of Carolina. Although I didn't enjoy Trash nearly as much as Bastard, I did favour 'Don't Tell Me You Don't Know' and 'I'm Working On My Charm.'

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Page one, paragraph one of this collection of remembrances details the suicide of the author's eight-year-old cousin. Allison signals immediately her intent - to provoke, to shock and to stir the reader out of their their comfortable apathy. A born storyteller, she swings effortlessly between themes including abuse, death, poverty and sex (the sweaty, passionate, lesbian variety). Highly recommended for all, especially lovers of Southern and/or queer fiction. ( )