Ugliness

""A brave, valuable exploration of something we don't usually want to address, and a thoroughly determined attempt to define the indefinable. Ugliness is truly readable and intelligent.""--Virginia Nicholson, author of All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty ""Hilal has managed to distort beauty and to beautify ugliness with her probing narrative and astute gaze. This is a profound, political, engrossing work.""--Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists and Walking on the Ceiling ""An unflinching, politically charged visual and textual exploration into the norms of appearance. Awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize 2023 for non-fiction, the book explores who we are putting at the end of accusations of ugliness, and why.""--GQ Middle East ""Deals with the concept of ugliness and what responsibility society has toward bodies deemed to be 'ugly.' It's about the meaning of beauty, growing up and coming to terms with ugliness.""--Vogue Germany ""Aesthetic canons are the result of an education that seeks to create hierarchies. And they are arbitrary as explained by Moshtari Hilal, an artist finally at peace with a face that has long tormented her.""--Vanity Fair Italy ""What makes Ugliness special is the unconventional form of the text: a mixture of essayistic passages, autobiographical writing, poems, personal photos and collages, in which the author's nose often can be seen . . . The personal mixes with the researched, the stylized with the academic. Ugliness should therefore also be understood as a work of art, not just as a non-fiction book. As this hybrid, Ugliness is captivating.""--Süddeutsche Zeitung ""People still endure massive pain just to avoid being considered ugly. There is a reason for this, concludes Moshtari Hilal: beauty needs ugliness. Her book is a revelation, an eye-opener, a slap in the face.""--Westdeutscher Rundfunk