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PRAISE FOR WHITE GIRLS

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism 2017

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction.

Winner of The Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

“Effortless, honest and fearless.”

—Rich Benjamin, the New York Times Book Review

“Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes.”

—David L. Ulin, the Los Angeles Times

“A comprehensive and utterly lovely collection of one of the best writers around … a brilliant book of lovely writing.”

—Eugenia Williamson, the Boston Globe

“Exhilarating … audacious.”

—Jan Stuart, the San Francisco Chronicle

“[Als’s] theories are so original they’ll make you think differently about race and gender whether you’re a white girl or not … his sharper ideas will be debated for years.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“The writing itself stands as the most spectacular performance … brilliant lunacy.”

—Melissa Anderson, Bookforum

“Ingenious provocation … 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.”

—Andrea Battleground, the A.V. Club (Named one of the A.V. Club’s “Favorite Books of the Year”)

“[Als] deconstructs traditional hierarchies of American identity and creates kaleidoscopic portraits of these artists, and of himself.”

—Rachel Arons, the New Yorker

“Mesmerizing.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“These essays defy categorization. They are unwieldy, and meandering and as self-indulgent as they are intriguing … The prose is both intelligent and inscrutable … 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

“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

“This book will change you.”

—Michael Robbins, the Chicago Tribune

“Cultural critic Hilton Als might have written the essay collection of the year with this month’s White Girls (McSweeney’s), if indeed it were merely a book of essays. Instead, each piece explores so many genres—melding fiction with fact, the deeply personal to the staid journalistic profile—that Als isn’t so much playing multiples chords at once as multiple pianos … Als has created a work of art.”

—Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine

“This is a book that readers will want to spend the rest of their lives with: a searching, insistent, and thoroughly wise collection.”

—Molly McArdle, Library Journal (starred review)

“Als’ work is so much more than simply writing about being black or gay or smart. It’s about being human.”

—Kirkus (starred review, named one of Kirkus’s “Best Books of 2013”)

“Mr. Als is a national treasure.”

—the New York Observer

“[Hilton Als] is above all a writer fascinated by people: their little habits and turns of phrase, their multi-layered sexualities, and their unfathomable relationships to each other or, in the case of his famous subjects, to the world.”

—Katie Haegele, UTNE

“[Als] is a poet on the page, and his insistence on breaking the essay form defines his liberation as a writer.”

—Anisse Gross, the Rumpus

“[E]verything Als is saying is a vivid, bright truth.”

—Victoria Brownworth, Lambda Literary

“Nothing short of masterful.”

—Nick Ripatrazone, HTMLGiant

“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

“Hilton Als’s White Girls gave me a gift very few books do: of hearing a voice that’s new, that comes as if from a different room. A nonsensical thing to say in one sense: he’s been writing brilliantly and visibly for almost 20 years. But there’s something about the work in this book. It’s a leap forward not merely for Als as a writer but for the peculiar American genre of culture-crit-as-autobiography. Its bravery lies in a set refusal to allow itself all sorts of illusions—about race, about sex, about American art—and the subtlety of its thinking is wedded maypole-fashion to a real confessional lyricism. In the way Anthony Heilbut’s recent Fan Who Knew Too Much taught me that I and everyone else I knew had a lot of black gay man in us, Als taught me that I have a lot of white girl in me, too, and so does he. And so do you, is where it gets interesting. If you think that sounds like another blurb-job or post-postmodern twaddle, I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged.”

—John Jeremiah Sullivan

“Hilton Als takes the reader on a wild ride through the complex, often rough, terrain of art, music, sexuality, race. What he writes—especially about Michael Jackson, Eminem, Louise Brooks, Richard Pryor, Gone With the Wind—is riveting.”

—Elaine Pagels

PRAISE FOR WHITE GIRLS

Hilton Als

WHITE GIRLS

PENGUIN BOOKS