Books
EXILE IN GUYVILLE
Winner of the
BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize
In the stories of Exile in Guyville, probable futures and alternate realities take aim at unruly women, and show how they refuse to be ruled. With a speculative and surreal style, Amy Lee Lillard’s prize-winning collection explores a living museum of women from across time; a life app that forces women to comply with beauty standards; a future internment camp with a literal race for survival; and a band of middle-aged Riot Grrrls, taking vengeance with a new power. With humor, rage, and a razor-sharp eye for detail, Exile in Guyville renders the invisible as seen, and the powerless as empowered.
A GROTESQUE ANIMAL
From University of Iowa Press
At the age of forty-three, after discovering she was autistic, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes. And she learned that her brash and trashy family of women, purveyors of dirty jokes, dirty pictures, and dirty shame, may have broken under the weight of invisible disability.
A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with invisible and unknown disability and a working-class background. And Lillard uncovers what it means to be a disabled slut, a queer aging woman, a descendent of wild but tamed mothers, and a survivor of the things patriarchy does.
DIG ME OUT
From Atelier26 Books
In this multilayered, provocative, and outrageously imaginative literary debut, ten deeply absorbing stories reveal the women who won’t smile. Angry, aching women react to the dismissal of their most secret or beloved needs and desires, and return to base instincts, primal fears, and mythic power. Across past, present, and future, around the Midwest and the world, these women demand we witness as they work to break through, to defy, to become. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be safe, but it will be real.
