Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm Sam for girls, so welcome to the show. Today I am joined by writer Hilton Ailes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 for his work at the New Yorker, where he's been on staff since 1994.

In his three decades at the magazine,

he's written seminal profiles of Tony Morrison,

Maggie Nelson, and the late Andre Leon Talley.

Since 2012, he's been the magazine's lead theater critic.

When he's not writing for the New Yorker, he's writing for himself.

He's authored a handful of books including the women, white

girls, and his latest, My Pinup, an exploration of Desire, Sexuality, race, and Prince.

He does all that in less than 50 pages in this new novella.

And it's fairly characteristic of Hilton's work, which is marked by a kind of expansiveness,

entwining memoir with literary criticism.

Hilton has taken these qualities, usually reserved for the the page and recently brought them to the

Hammer Museum where he's organized a new exhibition titled Joan Didion what she means.

It's a stirring portrait of the late author featuring more than 200 works of painting,

photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of films for which Didian authored screenplays.

If you're in Los Angeles, the exhibition is open for one more week at the Hammer Museum.

After that, the show will move to the Perez Art Museum in Miami on July 13th.

To learn more be sure to visit hammer.uclA.

EDU. That's hammer. UCLA dot E-DU. For today Hilton and I of course unpacked these new projects

around Didion and Prince, but we also discuss his upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn,

where he grew up with his mother in the early 70s and quickly found writing. In fact, this episode is really the makings of Hilton Als,

and all the people that have shaped and formed the writer we know today.

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