David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American author of nonfiction, fiction, and works that resist generic classification. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), is, according to the publisher, a “rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about ‘truthiness,’ literary license, quotation, and appropriation.” 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.
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.
Shields’s first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting 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 new book, Reality Hunger, was published by Knopf on February 23, 2010. Before publication, Blake Morrison, in The Guardian, called it “a spirited polemic on behalf of nonfiction. . . . an important book. The fiction vs. nonfiction debate has become intense in recent years, and Shields cranks it up a notch. . . . smart, stimulating, and aphoristic. . . . a provocative and entertaining manifesto.”
Since 1988, Shields has been a professor of English at the University of Washington, and since 1996 he has been a member of the faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Several passages from Reality Hunger convey well some of Shields’s major concerns:
“When I was seventeen, I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast, because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art...art underwritten by reality hunger...is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art.” Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like...can be...art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.
“The center of the artistic process...for me...is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.”
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Knopf, 2008 (New York Times bestseller)
Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, Simon & Schuster, 2004 (named one of the year’s ten best books of nonfiction by the Seattle Times)
Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2002 (received Artist Trust fellowship)
"Baseball Is Just Baseball": The Understated Ichiro, TNI Books, 2001 (appeared on national bestseller list in Japan when reissued by Shueisha in a bilingual edition)
Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, Crown, 1999 (named a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award, also named one of the year’s ten best books of nonfiction by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, Amazon)
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, Knopf, 1996 (received PEN/Revson Award)
Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories, Knopf 1992 (received PEN Syndicated Fiction Award)
Dead Languages: A Novel, Knopf 1989 (received Governor’s Writers Award)
Heroes: A Novel, Simon & Schuster, 1984 (received James Michener Fellowship)
Essays
“All the Best Essays Are True,” A Public Space, Fall 2009
“Notes for Eulogy for My Father,” New England Review, Spring 2008
“Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,” The Believer, March 2006
“Retrofeminist of the Night,” The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003
“Men and Games and Guns,” Yale Review, July 2003
“36 Tattoos,” Village Voice, October 16, 2002
Note: For a complete list of essays, see David Shields' official website (link below).
Short stories
“Properties of Language,” Yale Review, July 2001
“Ice,” Ploughshares, Spring 2001
“Audrey,” Listening to Ourselves: More Stories from “The Sound of Writing,” As Heard on National Public Radio, Anchor Books, 1994; “Stories on Stage” theatrical production of story, Chicago, 1995
“The Sixties,” Harper’s, December 1991
“Ode to the Donner Party,” Story, Summer 1991
Note: For a complete list of short stories, see David Shields's official website (link below).
