The Art of Poetry No. 111 (Interviewer)
“As long as I have music, I don’t ever feel like I’m solitary. It changes the air in the room. It’s the most consistent thing in my life.”
Hilton Als
Hilton Als
Hilton Als, a Paris Review advisory editor, is the author of the nonfiction works The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013). He has long been a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Interview
The Art of the Essay No. 3
In his open, omnivorous writing on literature, visual art, and performance, Hilton Als has made critical analysis and introspection a conjoined practice. The essay, which he has called “a form without a form,” is his primary mode, and he invariably interweaves family and friendship, American fixations on and lived experiences of race and sexuality, metaphor and reality.
The Art of Fiction No. 222 (Interviewer)
“Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.”
The Art of Theater No. 17 (Interviewer)
“I love going to plays. There’s a subconscious side to it, obviously–some people like to be spanked for XYZ psychological reasons, and I like to go to plays, and I can’t entirely explain why.”
The Art of Nonfiction No. 1 (Interviewer)
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”
Daily
The Garden
Ma thought it was a good idea. That we work together in the garden. But it wasn’t a garden then, just a long rectangle of funky-smelling earth.
James Baldwin, Restored
Hilton Als walks us through his new David Zwirner exhibition, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin.”
Making Theater: An Interview with Elizabeth LeCompte
Hilton Als and director Elizabeth LeCompte discuss her theater company’s latest production, ‘The Town Hall Affair’.
A Week in Culture: Hilton Als, Part 2
This is the second installment of Als’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1.
DAY FOUR
I finished watching There Will Be Blood, hours after I'd returned from visiting an actor friend in Brooklyn. She had a terrible accident while filming an e…
A Week in Culture: Hilton Als, Writer
DAY ONE There is not enough time for anything, ever. The point was to start this journal yesterday, a Monday, since everyone's “official,” week begins then—back from the weekend, off to MOMA, what's at the Frick, that kind of thing—but I d…
Dollface
It’s the queers who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who – in the same car – asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips befo…
Portfolio
Director’s Cut
At first, the TV light is silver. Then it goes to black and white. A moment passes and we see the Columbia Pictures lady. She’s a figure in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1976 play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, where she speaks the author’s thoughts, but at present I don’t know Kennedy’s play.