The Women Audiobook By Hilton Als cover art

The Women

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The Women

By: Hilton Als
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

What are the forces that shape us? 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.

© Hilton Als 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

African American Studies Americas Black & African American Gender Studies LGBTQ+ Studies Social Sciences Specific Demographics United States Women

Critic reviews

Inventive and daring (Richard Bernstein)
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)
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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