David Shields

The author of the best-selling The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead presents a call for new art forms to match the complexities of the 21st century, exploring how creative expression is being reshaped to reflect today's increasingly artificial and disconnected world.

A Manifesto

Reality Hunger

Shane Salerno

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people-and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company-The Private War of J.D. Salinger is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century. For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed. No longer. In the eight years since The Private War of J.D. Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger's death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger's World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last fifty-six years of Salinger's life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to never-before-published photographs (more than 100 throughout the book), diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, readers will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger's meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

Salinger

Edebiyat Hayatimi Nasil Kurtardi

In Dead Languages by David Shields, Jeremy Zorn's mother tries unsuccessfully to coax him into saying "Philadelphia," and his life becomes framed by his unwieldy attempts at articulation. Through family rituals with his word-obsessed parents and sister, failed first love, an ill-fated run for class president, as the only Jewish boy on an otherwise all-black basketball team, all of the passages of Jeremy's life are marked in some way by his stutter and his wildly off-the-mark attempts at a cure. It is only when he enters college and learns his strong-willed mother is dying that he realizes all languages, when used as hiding places for the heart, are dead ones.

Dead Languages

The author melds personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life. Shields filters his frank--and usually foreboding--data through his own expe

The Thing about Life is that One Day You'll be Dead

In That Thing You Do With Your Mouth, actress and voiceover artist Samantha Matthews offers—in the form of an extended monologue, prompted and arranged by New York Times–bestselling author (and Matthews’s cousin-by-marriage) David Shields—a vivid investigation of her startling sexual history. From her abuse at the hands of a family member to her present-day life in Barcelona, where she briefly moonlighted as a dubber of Italian pornography into English, Matthews reveals herself to be a darkly funny, deeply contemporary woman with a keen awareness of how her body has been routinely hijacked and how she has been “formatted” by her early trauma. Her story is a study of her own uneasy relationships with female desire, her tormentors, and her lovers--with whom she seeks out both the infliction and receipt of harm. This book is an attempt, sometimes self-thwarted, to break down barriers: sexual and emotional for Matthews, and literary for Shields. For Matthews and Shields, the only response to the unspeakable is to speak, to do that thing you do with your mouth, as directly and honestly as possible. Their provocative performance refuses neat resolution or emotional pornography; it will have readers, from literary critics to Jezebel commentators, raving, raging,

That Thing You Do With Your Mouth

A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.

"Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing and reading."--Back cover.

James Franco

Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey

Flip-Side

“Reading How Literature Saved My Life is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form.” ––Whitney Otto In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his “ridiculous” ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants “literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this––which is what makes it essential.” A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.

How Literature Saved My Life

Beril Tüccarbaşıoğlu Uğur (transl.)

Gerçeklik Açlığı insanı düşünmeye itmekten fazlasını yapıyor. Uzun zamandır okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan biri."
-Jonathan Safran Foer-

Gerçeklik Açlığı, Nietzsche'den Beckett'a, Godard'dan von Trier'e birçok önemli figürü ve Eminem, Larry David, Beastie Boys gibi popüler kültür ikonlarını, tam da artık onu deneyimleyemediği için "gerçeklik" konusunda takıntılı hale gelmiş Facebook ve Google nesliyle buluşturuyor.

David Shields hararetli tartışmalara yol açan kitabında, çağdaş sanat ve edebiyatın merkezindeki meselelere çığır açan bir bakış açısıyla yaklaşarak, kurgu-dışı ile kurgu, anlatı ile deneme arasındaki sınırlardan kurtulmayı öneriyor. Shields'a göre, başka şarkılardan alınmış parçalardan oluşan şarkılar, kolajlar, serbestçe alıntılanan metinler ve dijital teknolojiyle üretilmiş sonsuz kopyalar çağında artık bir yapıtın ya da fikrin sahibi olmanın tanımı; gerçekliğin, özgünlüğün anlamı değişiyor, telif hakkı talebi neredeyse bir kutsal kitap ya da efsane üzerinde hak iddia etmeye dönüşüyor. Devir paylaşımların, kendine mal etmenin, hatta "aşırma"nın devri.

Gerçeklik Açlığı, sınırlara meydan okuyarak başka yazarlara ait alıntılardan, aforizmalardan, anekdotlardan serbestçe "faydalanan", okurları hakikilik, özgünlük ve yaratıcılığa dair geleneksel fikirler üzerine yeniden düşünmeleri için kışkırtan çarpıcı bir manifesto, kendi gerçekliğine sahip yeni bir çağa özgü yeni edebiyat ve sanat formları icat etmek için açık bir davet.

"Gerçeklik Açlığı'nı yeni bitirdim ve beni şaşırttı, mest etti, bozguna uğrattı. Kısacası, aydınlandım. Gerçekten de, önemli ve ileriyi gören bir kitap: Kendi kendini yaratan bir sanat eseri, görkemli, heyecan verici ve acımasız."
-Jonathan Lethem-
(Tanıtım Bülteninden)


Gerçeklik Açlığı: Bir Manifesto

In the face of many well-meaning, but often misguided attempts to cure him of his stutter, young Jeremy Zorn develops both an astonishing prowess as an athlete and a large vocabulary, and comes to understand the power of language

"Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us ... seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness"--

Takes & Mistakes

Other People

NOBODY HATES TRUMP MORE THAN TRUMP: AN INTERVENTION is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump. It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the

Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention

Lo que pasa con la vida es que un día estarás muerto

Exploration of how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans think and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, and black bodies.

Facing Race During an NBA Season

Black Planet

Elizabeth Cooperman

Life Is Short--Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get will get an anthology; a course's worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity in an increasingly digital, post-religious age; and a meditation on the brevity of human existence. 1. We are mortal beings. 2. There is no god. 3. We live in a digital culture. 4. Art is related to the body and to the culture. 5. Art should reflect these things. 6. Brevity rules. The book's 40 contributors include Donald Barthelme, Kate Chopin, Lydia Davis, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, Wayne Koestenbaum, Anne Lamott, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Dinty W. Moore, George Orwell, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Saunders, Lauren Slater, James Tate, and Paul Theroux.

In Praise of Brevity

Life Is Short - Art Is Shorter

David Shields's long-awaited sequel to the highly acclaimed and influential Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. David Shields decided to gather every interview he's ever given, going back nearly 40 years. If it was radio or TV or podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him--approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form 22 chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, "the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line." The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author--in this case, a late-middle-aged white man--is strangely, thrillingly, absent. As Chuck Klosterman says about the book, "Logic suggests that people are best understood through the things they say, but that's not how the media usually work. People are actually defined by the questions they get asked (and the degree to which their answers can be framed to prove whatever was already assumed to be true). The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong." The Very Last Interview is a sequel to Shields's seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. As Kenneth Goldsmith says, "Just when you think Shields couldn't rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs."

The Very Last Interview

Matthew Vollmer

Two writers and professors present 40 short pieces of fiction that serve as humorous counterfeit texts, including a personal ad from Ron Carlson, a parking department complaint from Amy Hempel and a list of works cited from Rick Moody. Original. 10,000 first printing.

David Shields

About

Books

Join the club