White Girls

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan 
'Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin' Observer 
 
'I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love' 
 
White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Louise Brooks and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is one of the most highly acclaimed essay collections in years. 
 
'A voice that's new, that comes as if from a different room. I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead 
 
'Effortless, honest and fearless' Rich Benjamin, The New York Times 
 
'Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes' David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times 
 
 'A comprehensive and utterly lovely collection of one of the best writers around' Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe

A rhapsodic and provocative collection of essays on race, class, sexuality and identity in America

Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin

The first time you read Hilton Als, it's a revelation ... you wonder where this guy has been all your life ... He is both a startlingly insightful intellectual and a friendly, open and generous-spirited companion. It is the authenticity of his voice which makes him so compelling. That and the sheer dazzling brilliance of his writing, visceral and poetic, big-hearted, hot-headed and fierce'

Enlightening... a book you should read now

The variations he plays on the themes of identity, intimacy and race achieve a fugue-like complexity and power

A stunning analysis of contemporary culture ... undoubtedly one of the most important books of our times

Pioneering ... a mosaic of thoughts and observations, taking in the landscape of a New York ravaged by AIDS and his private grief for his lost lover, imagining silent film star Louise Brookes' drawling inner life, and examining his own complicated relationship with his sexuality and blackness

I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged

An intersectional masterpiece of race and sexuality, fact and fiction, memoir and polemic. The book that allowed a generation to make radicalism full of beauty and emotion

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' - John Jeremiah Sullivan 
 
This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of 'white girls,' an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Michel Basquiat and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.

An American Rhapsody

I Don't Remember

There are few more fearless, thought-provoking writers at work today.

No one understands the intersections of race, gender and sexuality as intuitively as Als does or explodes them with more brio

Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes.

Als is a poet on the page, and his insistence on breaking the essay form defines his liberation as a writer

Als' work is so much more than simply writing about being black or gay or smart. It's about being human

A writer of many moods-meditative, sardonic, haunting, funny, reflective, and unconventional ... a compassionate writer looking for unity--even if it can't always be found

Als is pyrotechnic, lifting off the page in a blast of stinging light and concussive booms that somehow coalesce into profound cultural and psychological illuminations

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer and chief theatre critic at The New Yorker. He has received numerous awards, including the New York Association of Black Journalists' first prize for Magazine/Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment, a Guggenheim fellowship for Creative Writing, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the American Academy's Berlin Prize. He is a Professor at Columbia University's Writing Program, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

Hilton Als grew up in a corner of Brooklyn scarred by riots, racial segregation and sexual prejudice. As a young teenager, he began to glimpse possibility in the different cultures and ways of being he encountered through high school; in the black men and white men who found ways to be together. As a burgeoning writer in a Manhattan pulsing with new culture - with hip hop, Basquiat, nightclubs and new wave - Hilton at last came together with the gay family he had longed for. The timing was not opportune: reports of a 'rare cancer' were beginning to trickle through the press. 
 
Part autobiography, part reportage, part cultural criticism, I Don't Remember weaves the impossible story of queer America in the age of the AIDs crisis. It is an elegy like no other for an unsung generation of gay men: of heroic lovers and friends, visionary makers, artists and creators. By turns lyrical, wry, and exquisite in its poetic, rapid-fire storytelling, it sings a song of the necessity of connection, and the grandness of human endeavor, especially when it comes to loving, and being loved, in the face of social limitations, stigma, and unspeakable tragedy.

Hilton Als

One of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology … refreshing … magical … truly original

What makes this book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives

Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin

The first time you read Hilton Als, it’s a revelation … you wonder where this guy has been all your life … He is both a startlingly insightful intellectual and a friendly, open and generous-spirited companion. It is the authenticity of his voice which makes him so compelling. That and the sheer dazzling brilliance of his writing, visceral and poetic, big-hearted, hot-headed and fierce

A meditation on the concept of the “Negress,” a label that Als applies to himself as well as to his subjects … [The Women is] one of the most remarkable works of narrative hybridity that I have ever read

Als is a great critic, which is to say that sometimes his writing is clear as glass and sometimes it’s astringently oblique. But somehow I always know what he means, and I always believe him

At once eclectic and focused, dense and loose, intimate and sharp, Als’s writing is absorbing and ingeniously provoking

A stunning study of three people who turned conventional ideas of color, gender, and sexuality upside down in order to survive and shine. Even at their most unnerving, these are my new best friends, and Als—who writes with a painterly passion and a poet’s grace—is my favorite Negress of them all

What are the forces that shape us? In The Women, Hilton Als explores—with breath taking originality—the role of sexual and racial identity in marginalized lives. With a blend of fact and fiction, Als brings to vivid life a number of extraordinary characters, including: his mother, a singular woman whose West Indian heritage and determination inspired her son to write; Malcolm X's mother, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's burgeoning misogyny and fear; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who deeply empathized with white gay men; and Owen Dodson, teacher and poet, who played an important role in the author's development as a gay man, and thinker. 
 
Combining memoir, cultural history, social theory and storytelling, The Women is a profoundly innovative work which has inspired a generation of writers. Here, Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to scrutiny, showing ‘no mercy but every tenderness’. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

The Women

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Hilton Als

Praise for The Women

Inventive and daring

One of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology … refreshing … magical … truly original

What makes this book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives

Inventive and daring

One of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology … refreshing … magical … truly original

What makes this book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives

Inventive and daring

One of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology … refreshing … magical … truly original

What makes this book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives

Books by Hilton Als

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