Synopses & Reviews
White Girls, Hilton Als's first book since The Women 16 years ago, finds one of The New Yorker's boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of white girls,” as Als dubs them an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Michael Jackson and Flannery O'Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.
Review
"I read Als not only because he is utterly extraordinary, which he is, but for the reason one is often drawn to the best writers because one has a sense that one's life might depend on them. White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year.” Junot Díaz
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"A comprehensive and utterly lovely collection of one of the best writers around." Boston Globe
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"Suffering does not define Als; his art loping, loopy, yet astonishingly precise language does. This is a book that readers will want to spend the rest of their lives with: a searching, insistent, and thoroughly wise collection." Library Journal (Starred Review)
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"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....Whether his subject is his mother, himself, or seminal artists, Als is a fine, piercing observer and interpreter, a writer of lashing exactitude and veracity." Donna Seaman, Booklist
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"This was a book I hated as much as I loved it for the incisive cultural criticism that has made me question nearly everything.” Roxane Gay, The Nation
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"[E]verything Als is saying is a vivid, bright truth" Lambda Literary
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"Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes." Los Angeles Times
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"Effortless, honest and fearless." Rich Benjamin, The New York Times Book Review
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"Hilton Als's White Girls (McSweeney's) has reached out and grabbed me by my lapels." Library Journal
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"Als's work is so much more than simply writing about being black or gay or smart. Its about being human." Kirkus (Starred Review)
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"[Hilton] Als interweaves personal revelation with cultural touchstones, sometimes hopping from topic to topic at a breakneck speed, other times examining concepts so strategically and methodically his words become scalpels, flaying open unacknowledged bias, privilege, and conflict where he sees it." The A.V. Club
About the Author
Before working at The New Yorker, Hilton Als was a staff writer for The Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has also written articles for The Nation and collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston. The winner of writing awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists and the Guggenheim Foundation, he lives in New York City.