Dig Me Out

by Amy Lee Lillard

Spanning genres, continents, and eras, Amy Lee Lillard’s multilayered debut story collection is all at once outrageously imaginative, provocative, and deeply absorbing. Ranging from the speculative to the historical, from magical realism to forensic realism, Dig Me Out carries the reader somewhere new — and newly thrilling — with every story, and constitutes a dazzling and rightfully dangerous work of literary art.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

214 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2021

About the author

Amy Lee Lillard is the author of Dig Me Out from Atelier26 Books. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her writing also appears in Foglifter, Off Assignment, Barrelhouse, Adroit, Gertrude, and other publications.

Amy is one of the broads behind Broads and Books, the funny and feminist book podcast.

She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European program at Cedar Crest College, an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and a BA in English, journalism and psychology from the University of Iowa.

Reviews

[Ann Stinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mesmerizing read. I was reading while my husband was driving and we went 12 miles past our exit before I realized it. Lillard's women are raw, sharp and real. Their emotional lives are very different than mine, but I was pulled in anyway. After two weeks of them living in my mind, the jagged edges of their world remains.

[Eric N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of bold and provocative stories simply knocked my socks off. The women in these stories act without fear, and in writing these stories so does the author, Amy Lee Lillard. She is a talent to recognize. I cannot wait to read everything she puts out into the world.

[Rickydean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once you start this book, you will not want to put it down. The first story will hook you with a unique style and intense ending. These 10 stories are about women in the past, present and ( speculative ) future. They are women working to make a change in their circumstances and they are doing it with power and without reservation. This is one of the best short story collections that I have read!

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

These multi-layered stories are riveting and propulsive. The characters and stories have staying power (I’m looking at you Bull in the Heather) and with each turn of the page, I started to get anxious that there were not enough stories left – a sure sign that this is a talented voice who earned this debut and many more. The title story, Dig Me Out, swept me up and put directly in a book-hole, unable to do anything but read it again. I cannot recommend it enough.

[David R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lillard's stories go for the throat. They have bones to pick, but they take their time working through the flesh first. Lillard's weapons of choice are an imagination grounded in the minutia of the real -- a museum visit, a slightly angled incisor, roadkill, a cell phone message, a beige tea cup -- that stretches to the suprareal, as in this s%@t just got real. You might think you know where these stories are headed, but trust me you don't. You may think you've encountered these characters before, maybe in your own family, maybe in line at Walmart, maybe in other saucy stories about powerful women. But you haven't, because nobody sees the world in all its quantum spooky-action-at-a-distance wonder quite the way Lillard does or writes with such stiletto wit and precise incision.

[Maggie Bear · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book six stars if I could!

[Marilyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to abandon 2/3 of the way through. Depressing short stories.