White Girls

Product Description

I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling- with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love'

This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of white girls, an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Paul Basquiat, Brooklyn, and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling- with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love'

This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of white girls, an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Paul Basquiat, Brooklyn, and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.
Hilton Als is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer and chief theatre critic at 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 a Professor at Columbia University's Writing Program, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.