The Women

Imaginative, brilliant and daring—Hilton Als's now-classic meditation on gender, race and personal identity in America.

What are the forces that shape us? In The Women, Hilton Als explores—with breathtaking originality—the role of sexual and racial identity in marginalised 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 empathised 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.