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The Women
- Author
- Hilton Als
- Narrator
- Mirron Willis
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 26 February 2026
- Run Time
- 4 hours 34 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
What are the forces that shape us? Hilton Als’s brilliant, now-classic meditation on gender, race and personal identity in America
In The Women, Hilton Als explores—with breath taking originality—the role of sexual and racial identity in marginalized lives. With a blend of fact and fiction, Als brings to vivid life a number of extraordinary characters, including: his mother, a singular woman whose West Indian heritage and determination inspired her son to write; Malcolm X's mother, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's burgeoning misogyny and fear; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who deeply empathized with white gay men; and Owen Dodson, teacher and poet, who played an important role in the author's development as a gay man, and thinker.
Combining memoir, cultural history, social theory and storytelling, The Women is a profoundly innovative work which has inspired a generation of writers. Here, Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to scrutiny, showing ‘no mercy but every tenderness’. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.
‘Magical … truly original … Writing of people who limited themselves and died of it, Als has overcome limits’ The New York Times Book Review
© Hilton Als 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Critics Review
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Inventive and daring
The New York Times
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One of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology … refreshing … magical … truly original
The New York Times Book Review
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What makes this book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives
Kirkus Reviews
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Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin
Observer
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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The first time you read Hilton Als, it’s 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
Big Issue
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A meditation on the concept of the “Negress,” a label that Als applies to himself as well as to his subjects … [The Women is] one of the most remarkable works of narrative hybridity that I have ever read
Bookforum
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Als is a great critic, which is to say that sometimes his writing is clear as glass and sometimes it’s astringently oblique. But somehow I always know what he means, and I always believe him
The Nation
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At once eclectic and focused, dense and loose, intimate and sharp, Als’s writing is absorbing and ingeniously provoking
Windham Campbell Prizes
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A stunning study of three people who turned conventional ideas of color, gender, and sexuality upside down in order to survive and shine. Even at their most unnerving, these are my new best friends, and Als—who writes with a painterly passion and a poet’s grace—is my favorite Negress of them all
Michael Musto
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Hilton Als
- Narrator
- Mirron Willis
- Duration
- 4 hours 34 minutes
- Release Date
- 26 February 2026
- ISBN
- 9781837311798
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Biography: historical, political and military, Memoirs, Gender studies: women and girls, LGBTQIA+ Studies / topics, Feminism and feminist theory, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.What are the forces that shape us? Hilton Als’s brilliant, now-classic meditation on gender, race and personal identity in AmericaIn The Women, Hilton Als explores—with breath taking originality—the role of sexual and racial identity in marginalized lives. With a blend of fact and fiction, Als brings to vivid life a number of extraordinary characters, including: his mother, a singular woman whose West Indian heritage and determination inspired her son to write; Malcolm X's mother, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's burgeoning misogyny and fear; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who deeply empathized with white gay men; and Owen Dodson, teacher and poet, who played an important role in the author's development as a gay man, and thinker.Combining memoir, cultural history, social theory and storytelling, The Women is a profoundly innovative work which has inspired a generation of writers. Here, Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to scrutiny, showing ‘no mercy but every tenderness’. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.‘Magical … truly original … Writing of people who limited themselves and died of it, Als has overcome limits’ The New York Times Book Review© Hilton Als 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
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