Results for 'hilton als'

1. Hilton , Als

I Don't Remember

Part autobiography, part reportage, part cultural criticism, a fierce and memorable new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.The letter was written in his strong hand and to quote it from memory is to blush with all the possibility his letter contained, and how much do I miss all that possibility. So, I won't quote it verbatim. Because if I did, I'd have to stop and put my pen down and let hope dry up the page-hope that this will matter to you, and to others who know nothing of this science fiction, of first a letter filled with hope and then a decade later no more letters except this present day letter to the living who want to hear our AIDS dead, the better to understand what that was, and maybe run with it into a more loving future.life among others-family, friends, people loved and lost. I Don't Remember traces his coming of age, from his mother's Crown Heights house filled with sisters, to the thrilling new world of Columbia University, where other young men also found joy in poetry, film, and art. He tours the myriad cultural influences from 1980s New York that helped form the extraordinary artist we know today. "Foul with experience" and "burning with want," Als attempts to leave the shyness of his youth behind and claim the truth "for once, and at last." Even as he acknowledges the impossibility in its telling, he forges ahead, laying bare the complexities of love, joy, pain, and yearning that have animated his life. I Don't Remember stands tall as a work of personal confession and cultural portraiture. But above all, it is an ode and an address to lovers who saw and touched Als's soul, held there still.

1. Hilton , Als

The Women

A New York Times Notable BookThe Pulitzer Prize-winning critic investigates the roles of race and sex in his own life and in literary history.Daring and fiercely original, The Women is 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 writer's 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 son's 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 author's 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 Women was a prescient work of criticism and self-investigation whose clear-eyed insight still feels fresh and urgent to this day. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that created a form all its own.

1. James Merrill
2. Hilton Als

A Different Person

1. Andy Warhol

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [50th Anniversary Edition]

Speculative Light

Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another’s artistic values. This book brings together scholars, critics, and artists who examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life.

Speculative Light

“This is a vibrant, timely, and vital collection of essays that illuminate how we can read James Baldwin through Beauford Delaney’s paintings and see Delaney’s paintings through Baldwin’s writing. Placing the lives and works of these two close friends side by side tells us much about kinship, intimacy, and craft, not only in relation to Delaney and Baldwin but in African American culture more broadly.” - Douglas Field, author of (Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me) “James Baldwin was most moving when recalling the aesthetic education he received from Beauford Delaney-who taught him both how to listen, ‘to hear [in Black music] what I had never dared or been able to hear,’ and how to see ‘and . . . trust what I saw.’ Speculative Light bears extraordinary witness to the lives of two men, devoted to their craft, moving always in the direction of wonder and uncertainty, buoyed by that loving and shared sense of attunement.” - Stephen Best, author of (None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life) "This book peers into an intimate relationship between two Black, queer men who grappled with the harsh lens of shame and found solace in their art and one another; two friends, platonic lovers, mentor and mentee, who knew each other in ways their voracious public could not. We owe much of Baldwin’s oeuvre to Delaney, and we owe it to Delaney to look again." - Jasmine Weber (Hyperallergic)