Recommended by Jessi Kalvitis

Over the course of the last few months, in fragments between readings for class and catching up on decades of bad television, I read Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature, a collection of essays, columns, and other nonfiction tidbits by Dorothy Allison. The book was published in 1994, but the pieces collected therein were mostly written in the mid- to late-1980s. Upon finishing the book, I noted in my reading journal (yes, I keep a reading journal) that many of the pieces were “about sex, but plenty of ones about home, about friendship, about growing up, about identity. This is more the Dorothy Allison I want to emulate—brash and bad-ass, but multifacted and intriguing.” Some aspects of the book are, thank goodness, severely dated but still interesting to read from a historical perspective, especially for anyone who may be curious about what it was like to be part of the feminist and/or LGBT community a generation ago. Other elements—such as when Allison speaks of her mother and many other relatives dying of cancer before age sixty, how none of them had ever had access to health care, how she had always assumed the same would happen to her—are, sadly, still extremely relevant today. It’s an alternately difficult and beautiful reading experience, and for both of those reasons I strongly recommend it.