David Shields Biography

David Shields is the author of sixteen books including I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf 2015); War is Beautiful: A Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict (powerHouse Books 2015); How Literature Saved My Life (Knopf 2013); The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead a New York Times bestselling novel; and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. Reality Hunger is the culmination of Shields’s life-long exploration of communication miscommunication mass culture nonfiction and genre-blur. The New York Times said it “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” and “probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.” Chuck Klosterman said it “might be the most intense thought-accelerating book of the last ten years.”
Other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine Harper’s Salon and Slate and his work has been translated into twenty languages. Shields’s work is concerned with disclosure rather than silence and he’s interested in demotic democratic disclosure rather than disclosure reserved only for certain people. He’s devoted to literary and emotional risk and to the attendant anxiety within himself and the reader and the culture as a whole.

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