Trash [Paperback]

“I’ve these pictures my mama gave me – stained sepia prints of bare dirt yards, plank porches, and step after step of children – cousins, uncles, aunts; mysteries. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories.”

From the tale of Shannon Pearl, the crazy, brooding albino child who, ‘had she been stronger or smarter would have been dangerous’ to the tragedy of Aunt Cora, who ‘packed up biscuits, cold chicken and Coca-Cola’ and left home with her four girls, Dorothy Allison casts an unblinking eye over the poor ‘white trash’ people of the American South. Drawing on her own background, the stories and poems in 'Trash' also form a remarkable confessional portrait of Allison herself, a lesbian, whose flight from her own violent, abusive family upbringing brought a hard won but exhilarating emotional and sexual freedom. Raw, chillingly honest and inspiring, she writes with unforgettable force and vision.

“Allison illuminates aspects of a class that has been neglected and misunderstood. Haunting work … a raw power”
NEW STATESMAN

“Allison’s work has all the hard won honesty of Carver’s best writing”
INDEPENDENT

“The literary territory that Allison has set out to explore is dangerous turf. It is a great pleasure to see her succeed, blithe and graceful as Baryshnikov in performance. A major talent … please reserve a seat of honour at the high table of the art of fiction for Dorothy Allison.”
NEW YORK TIMES

Dorothy Allison is the author of ‘Trash’, a collection of short stories that won two Lambda Literary Awards in 1989, and the autobiographical ‘Two or Three Things I Know for Sure’, both of which are available in Flamingo.

‘Bastard Out of Carolina’, her first novel, was shortlisted for the American National Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.