
Skin
Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $19.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Julie McKay
-
By:
-
Dorothy Allison
About this listen
A collection of critical essays from award-winning author Dorothy Allison about identity, gender politics, and queer theory, now with a new preface
Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality. In “Gun Crazy”, Allison delves into what guns meant to the men and women around her when she was growing up. She gives insight into the importance of speaking professionally about sexuality in “Talking to Straight People” and articulates the danger women feel about revealing their personal desires, even within feminist communities, in “Public Silence, Private Terror”. Allison is fearless in her discussion of many social and political taboos. Compelling and raw, Skin is an honest and intimate work - perfect for Dorothy Allison fans and new listeners alike.
©1994 Dorothy Allison (P)2020 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Trash
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Julie McKay
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash 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.
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Bastard Out of Carolina
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family - a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective.
-
-
Not for the Faint of Heart
- By Carolyn on 12-31-12
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Julie McKay
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 next.
-
-
Breathtaking
- By heyblondie on 12-18-24
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Why Read the Classics?
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
This Boy's Life
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.
-
-
Beautiful, unsentimental memoir of youth
- By Darwin8u on 04-27-13
By: Tobias Wolff
-
The Displaced
- Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen - editor
- Narrated by: Greta Jung, Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience.
-
Trash
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Julie McKay
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash 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.
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Bastard Out of Carolina
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family - a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective.
-
-
Not for the Faint of Heart
- By Carolyn on 12-31-12
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
- By: Dorothy Allison
- Narrated by: Julie McKay
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 next.
-
-
Breathtaking
- By heyblondie on 12-18-24
By: Dorothy Allison
-
Why Read the Classics?
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
-
This Boy's Life
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.
-
-
Beautiful, unsentimental memoir of youth
- By Darwin8u on 04-27-13
By: Tobias Wolff
-
The Displaced
- Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen - editor
- Narrated by: Greta Jung, Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience.
-
The Eye of the Leopard
- A Novel
- By: Henning Mankell
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia not long after independence, hoping to fulfill the missionary dream of his friend Janice. He is also fleeing the traumas of his motherless childhood: his father's alcoholism, his best friend's terrible accident, Janice's death, his fear of an ordinary and stifled fate. Africa is a terrible shock, yet he stays and makes it his home. But he never fully comes to understand his place as a mzungu, a wealthy white man among native blacks, and the fragile truce between them.
-
-
Wonderful English translation.
- By Dartthecat on 01-01-25
By: Henning Mankell
-
Complaint!
- By: Sara Ahmed
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.
-
-
“if queer maps are useful, they are also created by use.”
- By ZC on 03-13-25
By: Sara Ahmed
-
You Are Your Best Thing
- Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
- By: Tarana Burke, Brené Brown
- Narrated by: Tarana Burke, Brené Brown, the Contributors, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tarana Burke and Dr. Brené Brown bring together a dynamic group of Black writers, organizers, artists, academics, and cultural figures to discuss the topics the two have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching: vulnerability and shame resilience.
-
-
Listen up...
- By HeyJude on 04-29-21
By: Tarana Burke, and others
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
Another Appalachia
- Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
- By: Neema Avashia
- Narrated by: Jeed Saddy
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always disbelief: "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity, while encouraging listeners to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole.
-
-
A great & educational reading experience
- By TeeReads on 08-21-24
By: Neema Avashia
-
The Ballad of the Sad Café
- By: Carson McCullers
- Narrated by: David Ledoux, Joe Barrett, Therese Plummer, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose cafe serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind", McCullers' first published story, written when she was only 17, about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.
-
-
Literate short stories
- By RueRue on 02-23-16
By: Carson McCullers
-
Unbound
- My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
- By: Tarana Burke
- Narrated by: Tarana Burke
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words - me too - and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history.
-
-
Resilient
- By Sharna Che on 09-14-21
By: Tarana Burke
-
The Great Good Thing
- A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ
- By: Andrew Klavan
- Narrated by: Andrew Klavan
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How did a New York-born, Jewish, former-atheist novelist and screenwriter - a winner of multiple Edgar Awards, whose books became films with Clint Eastwood and Michael Douglas - find himself at the age of 50 being baptized and confessing Jesus as Lord? That's a tale worth telling.
-
-
Profound and Beautiful
- By Jason Hague on 09-30-16
By: Andrew Klavan
-
Last Days at Hot Slit
- The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin
- By: Andrea Dworkin, Johanna Fateman - editor and introduction, Amy Scholder - editor
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. It includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript.
-
-
Almost perfect reading
- By Paul on 04-02-20
By: Andrea Dworkin, and others
-
Brown Enough
- True Stories About Love, Violence, the Student Loan Crisis, Race, Familia, and Making It in America
- By: Christopher Rivas
- Narrated by: Christopher Rivas
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Brown Enough, Christopher Rivas's first book, is a literary memoir about what it truly means to be Brown in America. Holding the weight of being a Latino man, Christopher wonders where he falls on the color line, widened through his experience as an ethnically ambiguous actor of color in Hollywood and the many dangers and pitfalls that come from owning one's Brownness. Told through the lens of his personal stories and in a unique and literal voice, Christopher examines the deep history of his Dominican and Colombian heritage.
-
-
Raw, unfiltered, and beautifully expressed
- By Carolina Acosta on 10-07-24
-
The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
-
-
The great writing. the textures of the people and the streets of New York. Excellent and Thank You. Walking for Life..in NYC
- By Kindle Customer on 03-27-25
By: Vivian Gornick
-
Intimations
- Six Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality - or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?
-
-
An eye-opener for me into our inequitable systems
- By Rashida L on 07-29-20
By: Zadie Smith
What listeners say about Skin
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Cubcake
- 12-08-24
Learning a whole new lesson, this time through.
I read this in the 90’s, and despite the many massive changes in queer communities, in publishing, etc. Dorothy Allison still makes me think, and rethink my own and our cultural histories. Brilliant!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!