David Shields

Dans une promenade ludique composée de citations, daphorismes et de réflexions lumineuses sur lhistoire de la pensée, du cinéma et de lart, David Shields interroge la création littéraire à laune de l

'Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born.' Thomas Lynch Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being. Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers from Lucretius to Woody Allen Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people-and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company-The Private War of J.D. Salinger is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century. For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed. No longer. In the eight years since The Private War of J.D. Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger''s death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger''s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last fifty-six years of Salinger''s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to never-before-published photographs (more than 100 throughout the book), diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, readers 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 twentieth century.

Esta es la biografía de tu cuerpo, desde el día que naciste hasta el día en que morirás. Esta es la historia del optimismo de tu niñez, la emoción de tu adolescencia, la serenidad de tu madurez y el dolor de tu muerte. Lo que pasa con la vida es que un día estarás muerto es tu historia y también la de todos los demás. David Shields recorre el terreno que separa el nacimiento y la muerte para tratar de comprender cómo está conformada esta trama nuestra iluminándolo con datos científicos, lúcidas reflexiones y testimonios y opiniones de artistas, filósofos, poetas y figuras históricas. Con este ensayo lleno de humor, ternura, rabia y alegría, el autor nos recuerda cuál es el secreto de nuestra hermosa existencia: que un día estaremos muertos y que este momento que ha pasado nunca volverá

An instant New York Times bestseller, this explosive biography (People) of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century is as close as well ever get to being inside J.D. Salingers head (Entertainment Weekly). This revealing (The New York Times) and engrossing (The Wall Street Journal) oral biography, fascinating and unique

In Body Politic, David Shields looks at contemporary America and its mythology through the lens of professional and college sports. The result is an unusually insightful and provocative book about an empire in denial. Shields relentlessly examines the way we tell our sports stories (both fictional and nonfictional), considers the kinds of athletes we choose as heroes, and delineates the lessons and values we glean from sports. He explores the intricate and telling relationships between players and coaches, black and white players, immigrant and native players, male and female players, players and broadcasters, players and fans, and players and advertisers. In the process, he shows us the stories we Americans tell ourselves about the kind of people we believe ourselves to be.

In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years.David Shields decided to gather every interview hes ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasnt sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasnt interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested himapproximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the authorin this case, a late-middle-aged white manis strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.Shieldss new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, Just when you think Shields couldnt rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.

"Un manifiesto escrito en nombre de una generación en alza de escritores y artistas, una manera de "comenzar de nuevo" en el siglo XXI, un ataque frontal a las convenciones genéricas (...) David Shields nos guia en un viaje intelectual cautivador y estimulante"J.M. Coetzee¿La novela ha muerto? ¿Tiene la realidad derechos de autor? ¿El arte es robo? ¿Quien es el dueño de las ideas? ¿Que distingue la ficcion de la no ficcion? ¿La velocidad de la cultura digital ha dejado obsoletos los modos tradicionales de creacion? Explorando estas y otras preguntas, David Shields discute sobre las cuestiones artisticas centrales de nuetro tiempo.

An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, womens eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shieldss sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities, and impossibilities, for human connection.

Reading How Literature Saved My Life is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form. Whitney Otto In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascals Pensees to Maggie Nelsons Bluets, Renata Adlers Speedboat to Prousts 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. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesnt lie about thiswhich is what makes it essential. A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.

An instant New York Times bestseller, this explosive biography (People) of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century is as close as well ever get to being inside J.D. Salingers head (Entertainment Weekly).This revealing (TheNew York Times) and engrossing (TheWall Street Journal) oral biography, fascinating and unique (The Washington Post) and an unmitigated success (USA TODAY), has redefined our understanding of one of the most mysterious figures of the twentieth century. In nine years of work on Salinger, and especially in the years since the authors death, David Shields and Shane Salerno interviewed more than 200 people on five continents, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salingers World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Their intimate recollections are supported by more that 175 photos (many never seen before), diaries, legal records, and private documents that are woven throughout; in addition, appearing here for the first time, are Salingers lost lettersranging from the 1940s to 2008, revealing his intimate views on love, literature, fame, religion, war, and death, and providing a raw and revelatory self-portrait.The result is unprecedented (Associated Press), genuinely valuable (Time), and strips away the sheen of [Salingers] exceptionalism, trading in his genius for something much more real (Los Angeles Times). According to the Sunday Times of London, Salinger is a stupendous workI predict with the utmost confidence that, after this, the world will not need another Salinger biography.

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 Hunger is a radical reframing of how we might think about this truthiness: about literary licence, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels.Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. Converts will see Reality Hunger as a call to arms; detractors will view it as an occasion to defend the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked about books of the season.

Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old fathers vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being.Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers - from Lucretius to Woody Allen - Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

La primera biografía definitiva de J. D. Salinger, una de las figuras míticas del siglo XX. El autor de El guardián entre el centeno ha sido objeto de un sinfín de artículos en periódicos y revistas,

Una reflexión sobre quién es propietario de las ideas, qué distingue a la ficción de la no ficción, cuáles son las razones por las que los modos tradicionales de creación están en cuestión. Un libro con magnificas criticas de "The New Yorker", "The New York Times Review", "The Guardian", entre otros muchos. Un texto que conectara con las nuevas generaciones de lectores.

An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate about life and artbeers included.Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (hes a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art (he has five books coming out in the next year and a half). Shields and Powell spend four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine; they rewatch My Dinner with Andre and The Trip, relax in a hot tub, and talk about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayaland, of course, writers and writing.The relationshipthe balance of powerbetween Shields and Powell is in constant flux, as two egos try to undermine each other, two personalities overlap and collapse. This book seeks to deconstruct the Q&A format, which has roots as deep as Plato and Socrates and as wide as Laurel and Hardy, Becketts Didi and Gogo, and Car Talks Magliozzi brothers. I Think Youre TotallyWrong also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between reality and fiction, between life and art. There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universeonly a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish.James Francos adaptation of I Think Youre Totally Wrong into a film, with Shields and Powell striving mightily to play themselves and Franco in a supporting role, will be released later this year.

FEATURING WORK FROM LYDIA DAVIS, JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, JAMAICA KINCAID, ANNE LAMOTT, GEORGE SAUNDERS, AND MANY MOREAn anthology-manifesto proving that in our mortal, godless, digital age, the shortest art hits hardestfeaturing 40 masters of the mini-essay and flash fiction who make every word countLife Is Short - Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get 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.1. We are mortal beings.2. There is no god.3. We live in a digital culture.4. Art is related to the body and to the culture.5. Art should reflect these things.6. Brevity rules.The books 40 contributors include Donald Barthelme, Kate Chopin, Lydia Davis, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, Wayne Koestenbaum, Anne Lamott, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Dinty W. Moore, George Orwell, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Saunders, Lauren Slater, James Tate, and Paul Theroux.