Hilton Als

In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It’s delicious and it’s got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince’s ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily—even painfully—moving, Als plumbs longing: “I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn’t love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince—but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?”

Edited by Hilton Als With texts by Hilton Als, Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney Design by Joseph Logan When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of sixty-three, he left behind an extraordinary body of work. Novels, poems, film scripts, and, perhaps most indelibly, essays constituted the great artist’s writing, which was not divisible from his work and subsequent fame as a civil rights activist. A friend to and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was the voice of a movement—a voice that struggled after his early recognition as a creator to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “We” of his people. In God Made My Face, edited by Hilton Als on the occasion of the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, texts by Hilton Als, Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney create a kind of mosaic, one that not only mirror’s Baldwin’s various voices but examines, closely, his sui generis contributions to cinema, theater, the essay, and Black American critical studies—including queerness. Each author speaks from a personal, informed perspective—through voices that are both imbued with Baldwin’s deeply personal, anguished, and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately, because we are human, we share the potential to love and connect. With images of artwork by Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, and Larry Wolhandler

White Girls, Hilton Als’s first book since The Women fourteen 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, Malcolm X 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.