Als - White Girls

Praise for White Girls

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction

One of the A.V. Clubs Favorite Books of the Year

One of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2013

Exhilarating... Audacious.

Jan Stuart, San Francisco Chronicle

The writing itself stands as the most spectacular performance.... Brilliant lunacy.

Melissa Anderson, Bookforum

The book defies categorization.... These essays, like Mrs. Vreeland, step outside of what life is supposed to look like for them, and therein lies their beauty and bravery.

Rona Cran, TheTimes Literary Supplement (London)

Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin.

Alexander Larman, The Observer (London)

The first time you read Hilton Als, its 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.

Jane Graham, TheBig Issue (UK)

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

Rachel Arons, The New Yorker

[Alss] theories are so original that theyll make you think differently about race and gender whether youre a white girl or not.... His sharper ideas will be debated for years.

Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly

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)

Cultural critic Hilton Als might have written the essay collection of the year with this months White Girls, if indeed it were merely a book of essays. Instead, each piece explores so many genresmelding fiction with fact, the deeply personal to the staid journalistic profilethat Als isnt so much playing multiple chords at once as multiple pianos.... Als has created a work of art.

Christopher Bollen, Interview

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

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 ones life might depend on them. White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year.

Junot Daz

Hilton Alss White Girls gave me a gift very few books do: of hearing a voice thats new, that comes as if from a different room. A nonsensical thing to say in one sense: hes been writing brilliantly and visibly for almost twenty years. But theres something about the work in this book. Its 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 illusionsabout race, about sex, about American artand the subtlety of its thinking is wedded maypole-fashion to a real confessional lyricism. In the way Anthony Heilbuts 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 writesespecially about Michael Jackson, Eminem, Louise Brooks, Richard Pryor, Gone With the Windis riveting.

Elaine Pagels

PENGUIN BOOKS

WHITE GIRLS

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 Academys Berlin Prize. He is an associate professor at Columbia Universitys School of the Arts, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and TheNew York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in the United States of America by McSweeneys 2013

Published in Penguin Books (UK) 2018

Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2019

Copyright 2013 by Hilton Als

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Some of this work appeared in different form in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Artforum, Studio Magazine, Grand Street, The Believer, McSweeneys Quarterly, and the collection Malcolm X: In Our Own Image.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUB LICATION DATA

Names: Als, Hilton, author.

Title: White girls / Hilton Als.

Description: New York City : Penguin Books, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007000 (print) | LCCN 2019014472 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525506560 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134756 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Girls.

Classification: LCC GT2540 (ebook) | LCC GT2540 .A47 2019 (print) | DDC 305.23082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007000

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Cover photograph: The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, whats his color?

JEAN GENET

I know these girls they dont like me

But I am just like them.

THE ROCHES, THE MARRIED MEN