Showing results by author "David Shields" in All Categories

Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners 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 20th century.

Reality Hunger is a manifesto 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 Hungeris a radical reframing of how we might think about this 'truthiness'.

Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal's Penses to Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Renata Adler's Speedboat to Proust's A 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.

The Ark of Taste is a living catalog of our nation's food heritage preserving treasures passed down for generations—some rare, some endangered, all delicious. These foods reflect our country's diversity. By championing them, we keep them in production and on our plates, while promoting a more equitable alternative to industrial agriculture. The Ark of Taste is a vital resource for all of us who spend the summer searching for that perfectly ripe peach or heirloom tomato—or who are simply looking for the next good thing to eat.

Actress and voiceover artist Samantha Matthews offers - in the form of an extended monologue, prompted and arranged by New York Times best-selling author (and Matthews' cousin once removed) David Shields - a vivid investigation of her startling sexual history.

Mesmerized, at times unnerved, by his 97-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. It's an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

What does it mean to construct a self? What does it mean to turn your life into a narrative? What’s gained? What’s lost? What lies inevitably get told? What deeper truths are reached or at least reached for? Enough About You has no answers to these questions, but it frames and asks these questions in a much more overt, honest, precise, and provocative way than any book has attempted yet, and tries to do so while also delivering the pleasures of narrative, of memoir, of search-for-self.

Life Is Short - Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology gathering both mini-essays and short-short stories. Listeners, writers, and teachers 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.

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 “collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump”, and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse - a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump.

David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a 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 twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy.

David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint.

An homage to one of the great baseball players of our era, Baseball Is Just Baseball is a wide-ranging selection of Ichiro’s most startling and provocative observations.

The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and Black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in US culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly Black sport, White fans - including especially himself - think about and talk about Black heroes, Black scapegoats, and Black bodies. Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999.

Best-selling author David Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from The New York Times and came to a shocking conclusion: The photo-editing process of the “paper of record”, by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pulls the wool over the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.

In this truly one-of-a-kind book, the author/narrator - a representative, in extremis, of contemporary American obsession with beauty, celebrity, transmitted image - finds himself suspended, fascinated, in the remoteness of our wall-to-wall mediascape. David Shields reads his own life - reads our life - as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, and heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.

In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered 40 short fictions that they’ve found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents.

A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have heard yet about Donald Trump. It can be listened to 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 "collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump," and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse-a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump.

A debate, nearly to the death, about life and art, cocktails included. And a soon-to-be major motion picture from James Franco! Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he's a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he has overcommitted to art.

What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers. Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, 20 writers face this fact.

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.