David Shields

David Shields
Born	July 22, 1956 (1956-07-22)
Occupation	Writer/Professor
Nationality	American
Genres	Literary nonfiction
Influences Blaise Pascal, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Proust, E.M. Cioran, Milan Kundera, Renata Adler, George W.S.Trow, Ross McElwee
www.davidshields.com

David Shields (born July 22, 1956) 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.

Life and work

Shields, born in Los Angeles 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]}

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, 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.

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 Award 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