Hilton Als

In the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, man struggles to achieve infinity only to find madness as his consolation prize. In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, the pretty grandson of a prince seeks a mythical garden that haunts his every waking moment. His search leads him through a labyrinthine and seemingly abandoned monastery, whose astonishing beauty and inevitable decay the author painstakingly details. His work details a deeply deterministic worldview, in which suffering and sublimity are equally arbitrary conditions of existence. His prodigious sentences (translated from the Hungarian by faithful collaborator Ottilie Mulzet) are burdened with an accumulation of constitutive detail; they fold in, double back, and refract upon themselves, ever more quickly accelerating our attentions toward the anxieties of oblivion, which rapidly approaches but never seems to arrive.

My Pinup is smart, sensual writing on a life of loving Prince and on the life of Prince himself. Hilton Als’s Prince is a clear, Black, queer vixen; an idol whose lyrics and performance provide instructions for living — he also serves as frame, filter, and soundtrack for Als’s navigations of romance and heartbreak. This paean, an art object reminiscent of a chapbook or novella, goes down like a tiny fruit tart made from a keenly demarcated recipe: complex, ambrosian, and brief. For a moment you want more, but you’ve already been given enough. Fire and elegance abound in these intimate pages.

In this slim and brilliant memoir, Als explores race, power, and desire through the lens of Prince. Styling the legendary musician in the image of his lovers and himself, Als explores injustice on multiple levels, from racist record labels to the world’s hostility to gay Black boys…These 48 meandering pages are difficult to describe, but trust us: My Pinup is a heady cocktail you won’t soon forget.

A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince. Undeniably engrossing.

Als is a fine, piercing observer and interpreter, a writer of lashing exactitude and veracity.

Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes: Magnificent.