The Women

An American Rhapsody

I Don't Remember

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

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

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

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.

Hilton Als

Praise for White Girls

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

Effortless, fearless and honest

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

Effortless, fearless and honest

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

Effortless, fearless and honest

Books by Hilton Als

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