Women

‘Magical … truly original … Writing of people who limited themselves and died of it, Als has overcome limits’ The New York Times Book Review What are the forces that shape us? Hilton Als’s brilliant, now-classic meditation on gender, race and personal identity in AmericaIn 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.

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer and staff writer at The New Yorker. He has received a number of awards, including a Guggenheim, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the Windham Campbell prize from Yale University. He is the author of three acclaimed books – The Women, White Girls, and My Pinup; White Girls was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the LAMBDA Literary Award. Als is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley.