David Shields
“I’m animated by work that stretches me emotionally and intellectually. I remain provoked by the transgressive property of a work. I want a work that shocks me awake, not lulls me to sleep, that talks about what you’re not supposed to talk about. That’s my whole modus operandi. Without that, I don’t get to the page. Everything else is dull.”
“Very, very funny.”
“This book is a delightful and utterly Shields-ian work... Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious.”
“Maybe he’s simply ahead of the rest of us, mapping out the literary future of the next generation.”
“With Reality Hunger, David Shields offered us a manifesto, which unlike most manifestos, actually changed the world.”
“Beguiling and moving. There is always the temptation, in writing about sex, to sound superior, arch, immune to its power. Shields writes from a genuine place of curiosity and confusion. He is ridiculous and brave, he never conflates sincerity with genuine candor, and he poses the kinds of questions that only ever bring trouble (and are the only kind worth reading about).”
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-three books, most recently The Very Last Interview (NYRB, 2022). His next book is How We Got Here, to be published by Sublation Books in September 2024, described as “ a TED-talk-on-speed, a thrilling slideshow, an unnerving intellectual history of the last 170 years, in which David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.” Other books include Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018, The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now on Amazon, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Kanopy, and Google Play); Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary film about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (rave reviews in the New Yorker, the Nation, and dozens of other publications; film festival awards all over the world; available now on all of the same platforms listed above). A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His books have been translated into two dozen languages.
Interviewed by Guernica about The Trouble with Men, Shields said, “These men who commit acts of sexual misconduct tend to be unbelievably weak, and they mask or disguise or hide from their weakness by fantasizing about a weakened feminine and/or a reified masculinity. I think the key to a better discourse is for men to acknowledge, first, how lost and weak and broken they are. Once they have acknowledged that, and reckoned with that within themselves, it seems to me impossible or unlikely that they would commit the acts many such men are accused of. The key, from a man’s point of view, is for them to first understand their brokenness, their woundedness, their lostness, their sadness; that seems to me to accomplish much, at least potentially. “
Lynch: A History (Cargo Film & Releasing) explores the silence that nonconformist NFL star Marshawn Lynch deploys as a form of resistance. Culling more than 700 video clips and placing them in dramatic, rapid, and radical juxtaposition, the film is a powerful political parable about the American media-sports complex and its deep complicity with racial oppression. In the New Yorker, Hua Hsu says, “The film’s relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you, as random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern. It’s a gradient of American carnage.”
Shields frequently teaches in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Center for Fine Arts, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Washington, specializing in courses in literary nonfiction/creative nonfiction, autobiography, memoir, personal essay, the curated diary, literary collage, literary collaboration, oral history, dialogic books, one-act plays, remix-repurposing-“appropriation,” found documents, “fraudulent” artifacts, documentary film, the essay film, screenwriting, the photo essay, elegy, aphorism, brevity, the prose-poem, the short-short, flash fiction, “autofiction,” and other kinds of boundary-jumping work.
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