““When I first encountered Amy Lee Lillard’s fiction in Epiphany’s Breakout Writers issue, I looked her up, desperately hoping she had a book coming out. The wait is over, and what a dazzling book it is! With spare and unassuming prose, Lillard has produced a radically profound and unforgettable story collection that upends received notions of femininity and storytelling. Through their aspirations, their desires, their insecurities, and their heartbreaks, the women in DIG ME OUT offer us nuanced insights into the human condition.””

““Damn! I’m jealous of the sheer brio and adventure-someness of these stories — Amy Lee Lillard’s willingness to try on different forms, genders, identities, and voices in the service of dark truths. This is a firecracker debut with a rock n roll wildness at its heart.” ”

““Original and highly imaginative. Amy Lee Lillard is a daring writer.””

““A fierce debut collection inhabited by a wild multitude of characters. The women in Amy Lee Lillard’s stories catalogue the strangeness of the natural world, want to escape the confines of the body, seek revenge against convention, are witchy, feral, ready to tear free.””

““The women in these stories loom large. They take up space, raise their voice, fight back and break free. In stories spanning worlds long past to far dystopian future, we find women who channel rage and turn it into power, digging out of old lives, shedding skin, becoming something animal, elemental, new. Set to a rebellious Riot Grrrl soundtrack, this book is a feminist battle cry, a fist with black-painted nails pumped in dark Chicago clubs, in Midwestern cities and suburbs full of women who are hungry, who long for more, who scratch and claw and dig — into the earth, into their own skin — to find something better. A fierce reclamation of femininity, sexuality, and selfhood, DIG ME OUT made me pump my own fist in the air, reminding me of all the lives we can find when we’re brave enough to dig.” ”