White Skin

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.

Tucked away in northeastern Vermont, picturesque Askergan County is the perfect place for a winter vacation - for the lucky few who know about it. Askergan is so peaceful, crime so nonexistent, that they don't even have a full-time police force, just a Sheriff and two deputies who spend most of their time dishing out parking tickets and breaking up the occasional bar fight. But that was before the storm.

I’m a selkie, trapped above the waves until I can recover my skin. Humans used to call us seal-wives many years ago - before they broke the planet. I thought that fewer humans, after the warming, would mean less danger. My kind believed our world was finally recovering. We were wrong. Up here, the magic is fading and Old Ones like me are being traded as trophies for rich and powerful humans to display in collections. Without the Old Ones, the magic fades; without magic, the planet dies. Humankind has gone too far, and someone has to put a stop to it.

Angela is a woman trying to get by in this bewildering new world. Though she still lives with her husband and children, they lead separate lives. Confined to their rooms, they communicate via their computers and phones. In some ways, very little has changed. That is, until she spots a mysterious stranger walking through town without even a face mask for protection. A man, it seems, immune to this disease. A man unlike anyone else she knows. A man it might just be safe to touch....

My lips are white. Sixteen-year-old Sep stares into the bathroom mirror. It’s not some weird lipstick (she never wears lipstick). Her lips are just - white. In a panic, she digs up an old lipstick and smears it on her colorless lips. But soon, more and more white spots begin to bloom, spreading their chalky tendrils across her olive brown skin. Does she have a disease? Is she turning into some kind of freak?