White Girls

(Paperback)

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Description

A landmark work on race, sex, love and selfhood, from one of America's most iconic writers and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism 2017 '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.

Reviews

A rhapsodic and provocative collection of essays on race, class, sexuality and identity in America * Financial Times *
Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin * Observer *
Effortless, fearless and honest * New York Times *
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' * Big Issue *
Enlightening... a book you should read now * VICE *
The variations he plays on the themes of identity, intimacy and race achieve a fugue-like complexity and power * Washington Post *
Beautiful and deeply intelligent * New Statesman *
A stunning analysis of contemporary culture ... undoubtedly one of the most important books of our times * DAZED *
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 * AnOther Magazine *
Magnificent * Los Angeles Times *
Stunning * Kirkus Reviews *
Exhilarating ... Audacious * San Francisco Chronicle *
Brilliant * Boston Globe *
Mesmerising * Los Angeles Review of Books *
This will be debated for years * Entertainment Weekly *
This book will change you * Chicago Tribune *
I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
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-D Magazine *

Author Bio

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.