David Shields
Encyclopedia
David Shields is an American author of non-fiction, fiction, and works that resist generic classification. His latest book is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
(Knopf, 2010). Shields’s previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a meditation on mortality, was a New York Times bestseller.
in 1956, graduated from Brown University
in 1978, Honors in English Literature, magna cum laude. In 1980 he received an MFA
, with Honors, in Fiction, from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Shields’s first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University
in Canton, New York
. In 1989, he published his second novel, Dead Languages, a book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words. Shields’s third book, Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (1992), marked the beginning of his shift from traditional literary fiction toward collage, the blurring of genres, essay, and autobiography. This shift continued and deepened in such books as Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), and Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography (2002). Shields’s book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
(Knoff, 2010), argues for the necessity of “reality-based art” and the obsolescence of traditional narrative. Reality Hunger was reissued in paperback by Vintage in February 2011.
Shields is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington
. He is also a member of the faculty in the Warren Wilson College
MFA Program for Writers. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Shields lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter.
Shields’s books have generally been published to wide acclaim. Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity received the PEN/Revson Award. Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award, and was named one of 1999's ten best books of nonfiction by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, and Amazon.com. In Newsday, A.O. Scott called it “one of the best books ever written on the subject of sport in America, which is to say a book that is about a great deal more than sport.” Reality Hunger was named one of the best books of 2010 by Guardian
, Kirkus Review, the Portland Oregonian, New Statesman, and Irish Times.
Reality Hunger has been received with a polarized mixture of excitement and criticism. The book was praised by many prominent authors, including Jonathan Lethem
, Geoff Dyer
, Frederick Barthelme
, Jonathan Raban
, and Chuck Klosterman
, who wrote that it “might be the most intense, thought-accelerating book of the last 10 years.” In the New York Times Book Review, Luc Sante wrote that Reality Hunger urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum, and have just been waiting for someone to link them together... [Shields’s] book probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.”
In The New Yorker
, James Wood
criticized the book as being “imprecise,” arguing that its privileging of “reality” over traditional fiction was “highly problematic.” However, he conceded that Shields’s arguments about the “tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.”
Reality Hunger was a finalist for the 2011 Washington State Book Award
in History/General Nonfiction.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is a book by American writer David Shields, published by Knopf on February 23, 2010. The book is written in a collage style, mixing quotations by the author with those from a variety of other sources...
(Knopf, 2010). Shields’s previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a meditation on mortality, was a New York Times bestseller.
Life and work
Shields, born in Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
in 1956, graduated from Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
in 1978, Honors in English Literature, magna cum laude. In 1980 he received an MFA
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...
, with Honors, in Fiction, from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Shields’s first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University
St. Lawrence University
St. Lawrence University is a four-year liberal arts college located in the village of Canton in Saint Lawrence County, New York, United States. It has roughly 2300 undergraduate and 100 graduate students, about equally split between male and female....
in Canton, New York
Canton (village), New York
Canton is a village in St. Lawrence County, New York, United States. The village is centrally located in both the town of Canton and the county of St. Lawrence. The population was 5,882 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of St. Lawrence County...
. In 1989, he published his second novel, Dead Languages, a book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words. Shields’s third book, Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (1992), marked the beginning of his shift from traditional literary fiction toward collage, the blurring of genres, essay, and autobiography. This shift continued and deepened in such books as Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), and Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography (2002). Shields’s book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is a book by American writer David Shields, published by Knopf on February 23, 2010. The book is written in a collage style, mixing quotations by the author with those from a variety of other sources...
(Knoff, 2010), argues for the necessity of “reality-based art” and the obsolescence of traditional narrative. Reality Hunger was reissued in paperback by Vintage in February 2011.
Shields is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
. He is also a member of the faculty in the Warren Wilson College
Warren Wilson College
Warren Wilson College is a private four-year work college in the Swannanoa Valley, North Carolina, United States near Asheville. It is known for its curriculum of work, academics, and service, called "the Triad," which requires every student to work an on-campus job, perform at least one hundred...
MFA Program for Writers. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Shields lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter.
Work and themes
Much of Shields’s work enacts a critique of traditional categories within art and culture, such as the boundary between fiction and nonfiction; for instance, in Reality Hunger, in which he argues for the abandonment of the traditional novelistic form because of its inadequacy in dealing with what he views as an increasingly fragmentary culture. Shields writes, “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it's not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.” In its place, he advocates “collage” forms such as the lyric essay, prose poetry, and the “anti-novel, built from scraps.”Shields’s books have generally been published to wide acclaim. Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity received the PEN/Revson Award. Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award, and was named one of 1999's ten best books of nonfiction by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, and Amazon.com. In Newsday, A.O. Scott called it “one of the best books ever written on the subject of sport in America, which is to say a book that is about a great deal more than sport.” Reality Hunger was named one of the best books of 2010 by Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Kirkus Review, the Portland Oregonian, New Statesman, and Irish Times.
Reality Hunger has been received with a polarized mixture of excitement and criticism. The book was praised by many prominent authors, including Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
, Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is a British author and novelist. He is also a journalist who writes about a wide range of topics. His published work includes four novels and several books of non-fiction, which have won a number of literary awards...
, Frederick Barthelme
Frederick Barthelme
Fredrick Barthelme is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction...
, Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban is a British travel writer and novelist. He has received several awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers...
, and Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman
Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American author and essayist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and The Washington Post, and has written books focusing on American popular culture....
, who wrote that it “might be the most intense, thought-accelerating book of the last 10 years.” In the New York Times Book Review, Luc Sante wrote that Reality Hunger urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum, and have just been waiting for someone to link them together... [Shields’s] book probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.”
In The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, James Wood
James Wood (critic)
James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:...
criticized the book as being “imprecise,” arguing that its privileging of “reality” over traditional fiction was “highly problematic.” However, he conceded that Shields’s arguments about the “tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.”
Reality Hunger was a finalist for the 2011 Washington State Book Award
Washington State Book Award
The Washington State Book Awards are presented annually in recognition of notable books written by Washington authors in the previous year.This literary awards program was established in 1967 as the Governor's Writers Awards. The program was based at the Washington State Library in Olympia...
in History/General Nonfiction.
Books
- The Private War of J.D. Salinger, co-author with Shane Salerno (Forthcoming)
- The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, Co-Editor with Bradford Morrow, W.W. Norton, February 2011
- Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Knopf, February 2010
- The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Knopf, 2008
- Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, Simon & Schuster, 2004
- Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2002
- "Baseball Is Just Baseball": The Understated Ichiro, TNI Books, 2001
- Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, Crown, 1999
- Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, Knopf, 1996
- Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories, Knopf 1992
- Dead Languages: A Novel, Knopf 1989
- Heroes: A Novel, Simon & Schuster, 1984
Awards
- Finalist, Washington State Book AwardWashington State Book AwardThe Washington State Book Awards are presented annually in recognition of notable books written by Washington authors in the previous year.This literary awards program was established in 1967 as the Governor's Writers Awards. The program was based at the Washington State Library in Olympia...
in History/General Nonfiction, for Reality Hunger, 2011 - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 2005–2006
- Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, for Black Planet, 2000
- Finalist, PEN USA Award, for Black Planet, 2000
- PEN/Revson Award, 1992
- National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, 1991, 1982
External links
- Official website
- An interview with David Shields on The Marketplace of Ideas
- Interview with David Shields The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 19