The Women

Inventive and daring

Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

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

Andrea Lee, The New York Times Book Review

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

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

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

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

At once eclectic and focused, dense and loose, intimate and sharp, Als’s writing is absorbing and ingeniously provoking

Windham Campbell Prizes

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

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

Observer