The Women

A New York Times Notable Book

The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic investigates the roles of race and sex in his own life and in literary history.

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer’s subjects: his mother, a self-described “Negress,” who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son’s misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other Black people or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author’s own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. Written in 1996, long before the rise of the genre-defying memoir, The Women was a prescient work of criticism and self-investigation whose clear-eyed insight still feels fresh and urgent to this day. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that created a form all its own.

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff writer for 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 an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

• Publisher: Picador
  
• Publish Date: February 16, 2027
  
• Pages: 176
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Paperback
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781250838186
  
• Dimensions: 8.3 in H | 5.4 in W | 1 in T | 1 lb Wt
  
• BISAC Categories: Biography & Memoir, Politics