The Women // (Pre-order, Feb 16 2027)

ANew York TimesNotable Book

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

Daring and fiercely original,The Womenis 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 writers 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 sons 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 authors 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 Womenwas a prescient work of criticism and self-investigation whose clear-eyed insight still feels fresh and urgent to this day.The Womenis that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that created a form all its own.

Hilton Alsis a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff writer forThe 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 Academys Berlin Prize. He is an associate professor at Columbia Universitys School of the Arts, and his work has appeared inThe Nation,The Believer, andThe 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