David Shields
Novelist, Essayist & Memoirist
"Maybe he’s simply ahead of the rest of us, mapping out the literary future of the next generation." —Newsweek
“There are paragraphs so finely wrought, so precisely tuned to the narrow-band channels between reader and writer, that the caught breath of inspiration and the sighs of expiration leave us grinning and breathless.”
—Thomas Lynch, The Boston Globe
David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, has been hailed by critics as “the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010” (GQ) and “mind-bending” (NY Times). His other nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008); Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography. His three novels include Dead Languages, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award; Heroes; and Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories. Audacious, sharp-eyed, hilarious, and self-deprecating all at once, David Shields is one of the strongest voices in contemporary American nonfiction and fiction.
Shields’s many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.
Shields lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. He has also been a faculty member of Warren Wilson College’s Low-residency MFA Program since 1996. His work has been translated into twenty languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, and Japanese.
About REALITY HUNGER (2010)
“I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger and I’m lit up by it—astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed.” —Jonathan Lethem
Fresh from his acclaimed exploration of mortality in the genre-defying, best-selling The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, David Shields has produced an open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century. Shields’s manifesto is an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of “reality” into their work. The questions Shields explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a radical reframing of how we might think about this “truthiness”: about literary license, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels. Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. Converts will seeReality Hunger as a call to arms; detractors will view it as an occasion to defend the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked about books of the season.
About THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD (2008)
“A double memoir-commonplace book in which Shields presents his and his father’s life stories, lovingly encrusted with facts about aging and death (it turns out your soul doesn't weigh 21 grams after all, and your hair and nails do not keep growing postmortem) and quotations (‘After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death’—Emerson). The result is an edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage. ‘I want him to live forever,’ Shields writes, ‘and I want him to die tomorrow.’” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by his ninety-seven-year-old father's nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion—an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life. Shields begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about himself and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers—from Lucretius to Woody Allen—yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family. A book of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead will move readers to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.
