David Shields

For the American ice hockey defenseman, see David Shields (ice hockey).

David Shields is an American author who, as he states on his webpage, has published

twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet... (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award)... and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.^{[1][independent source needed][not verified in body]}

David Shields
Born	(1956-07-22) July 22, 1956 (age 69)[citation needed] Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Writer/filmmaker/professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Brown University (BA) University of Iowa (MFA)
Period	1984–present
Genre	Book-length essay, Documentary film
Website
www.davidshields.com

Shields continues,

The film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017... Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch,^[who?] who used silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance^{[clarification needed]}... A new film, How We Got Here... which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon, was released in early 2024, the same time a companion book of the same name was released.^{[1][independent source needed][not verified in body]}

Shields concludes, stating that he is:

[t]he recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships... [and] a contributing editor of Conjunctions— [and] has published... in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays... [and notes that h]is work has been translated into two dozen languages.^{[1][independent source needed][not verified in body]}

Early life and education

Shields was born in Los Angeles, California in 1956,^[2] on July 22, to a lower-middle-class Jewish family.^{[citation needed]} By his self-description in interview, both of his parents were journalists.^[2] His mother was the West Coast correspondent for the Nation for many years; his father worked as a speechwriter for progressive politicians,^{[citation needed]}

Shield's was raised in San Francisco,^[3] after his family moved there in In 1962.^{[citation needed]} In interview, Shields describes himself as growing up "in a pretty white suburb of San Francisco, a little bit south", and that his parents were "very politically involved," for instance, being very involved in the issues of school desegregation and civil rights.^[3] In interview, Shields describes his father as working for a poverty program, "trying to help... people find housing or jobs", and that his family would, at times, have people living in their home for extended periods.^[3] Shields has an older sister, a half-brother, and a half-sister,^{[citation needed]} and has noted in interview both that he perceived that his parent's marriage was unhappy, and that tensions existed "between the parents and children in our family".^[3][4]

In his self-description at his faculty webpage, Shields describes himself as graduating with honors (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude), from Brown University, with a B.A., in 1978,^[5] in British and American Literature.^{[citation needed]} and as receiving a M.F.A., with Honors in Fiction, from the University of Iowa, in 1980,^{[5][independent source needed]} the latter in association with the Iowa Writers' Workshop.^{[citation needed]}

Career

Academic appointments

Shields had an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y, from 1985 to 1988.^{[citation needed]} As of July 2020, Shields was listed as a core faculty member in the area of fiction, in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College,^[6] a low-residency program,^{[citation needed]} a position that he has reportedly held since 1996.^{[citation needed]} As of August 2017, Shields was affiliated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, having done a reading and lecture at that year's event.^[7] He became a visiting instructor there in 2001,^{[citation needed]} and as of this date,^[when?] has continued in that teaching role.^{[citation needed]}

Efforts in writing and film

Shields's debut work of fiction, Heroes: A Novel, about a Midwestern sportswriter's fascination with a college basketball player,^{[citation needed]} was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984.^{[8][independent source needed]} In 1989, Knopf published Shields's second fictional work, Dead Languages: A Novel,^{[9][independent source needed]} a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up with a severe stutter.^{[citation needed]} Dead Languages is a work of fiction, but it incorporates significantly larger shards of reality than Shields's first book, marking the initial phase of Shields's transition toward nonfiction, which would ultimately lead him to employ the literary collage and 'anti-novel' forms for which he is most well-known.^{[citation needed][editorializing][original research?]}

In 1992, his Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories, was published,^{[10][independent source needed]} by Knopf.^{[citation needed]} Shields's Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, published by Knopf that same year,^{[11][independent source needed]} was his fourth book, and first work of literary collage.^{[original research?][citation needed]}

Between 1997 and 2009, Shields published five books: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999),^{[12][independent source needed]} with Random House, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA award;^{[citation needed]} Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro (2001),^{[12][independent source needed]} with TNI Books,^{[citation needed]} which might have achieved bestseller status in Japan;^{[13][better source needed]} Enough About You: Notes toward the New Autobiography (2002),^{[12][independent source needed]} with Simon & Schuster;^{[citation needed]} Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (2004),^{[12][independent source needed]} with Simon & Schuster;^{[citation needed]} and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008),^{[12][independent source needed]} with Knopf, a New York Times bestseller.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, Shields's tenth book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was published by Knopf. In Vanity Fair, Elissa Schappell called Reality Hunger a "rousing call to arms for all artists to reject the laws governing appropriation, obliterate the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and give rise to a new modern form for a new century."^[14] In 2019, Lithub named Reality Hunger one of the 100 most important books of the 2010s.^[15] In 2011, Norton published The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, an anthology Shields co-edited with Brad Morrow. In 2012, New Harvest published Jeff, One Lonely Guy, a collage co-written by Shields, Jeff Ragsdale, and Michael Logan. Also in that year, Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012), an anthology co-edited by Shields and Matthew Vollmer,^{[12][independent source needed]} was published by Norton.^{[citation needed]}

Shields in 2013

In 2013, Knopf published How Literature Saved My Life, a blend of confessional criticism and cultural autobiography.^{[citation needed]} Also in 2013, Shields and screenwriter and Salinger documentarian Shane Salerno^[16] presented Salinger,^{[12][independent source needed]} published by Simon & Schuster,^{[citation needed]} an "oral biography" of J.D. Salinger.^{[This quote needs a citation]} Salinger was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.^{[citation needed]}

In 2015, Life Is Short—Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, co-edited by Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman,^{[12][independent source needed]} was published by Hawthorne Books.^{[citation needed]} In that year, Shields also came put with That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as told to David Shields,^{[12][independent source needed]} published by McSweeney's;^{[citation needed]} I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, co-written with Caleb Powell;^{[12][independent source needed]} and War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict,^{[12][independent source needed]} a deconstruction of The New York Times' front-page war photography, published by PowerHouse Books.^{[citation needed]}

In 2017, Other People: Takes & Mistakes^{[12][independent source needed]} was published by Knopf.^{[citation needed]} That same year, the film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, starring Shields, Caleb Powell. and James Franco,^{[17][independent source needed]} written by Shields and Powell and directed by Franco, was released by First Pond Entertainment.^{[citation needed]} The film, available on Vudu as of this date,^{[when?][citation needed]} presents a "debate, nearly to the death, about life and art".^{[12][independent source needed]} "The trio debate the value of life versus art; art wins, barely."^{[editorializing][according to whom?][citation needed]}

Shields's book, Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention, was published in 2018,^{[12][independent source needed]} by Thought Catalog Books.^{[citation needed]} In 2019, The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power was published by Mad Creek Books.^{[citation needed]}

In 2019, Marshawn Lynch: A History, directed by Shields, shot and edited by James Nugent, and executive produced by Danny Glover,^[18] premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF).^[19] The film, Shields' debut documentary,^{[citation needed]} has been described^{[according to whom?]} as an ode to Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.^{[clarification needed][original research?][citation needed]} The film, which Shields also wrote and produced,^[20] was an official selection of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2019,^[18][20] and there, was a special jury mention for "Creative Use of Archival Footage", as well as being named as one of the five best films at IDFA that year (by Sight & Sound).^{[20][independent source needed]} It has won further awards, including winning the "End of Cinema Award for best nonfiction film of the year", and being "shortlisted for Filmspotting Golden Brick award for best low-budget indie film of 2019"^{[20][independent source needed]} As of 2019, the film was available on Peacock, Amazon, Google Play, Kanopy, and Vimeo;^[20] as of this date,^[when?] it was available on Sundance TV, AMC, First Look Media, Amazon Prime, and iTunes/AppleTV.^{[citation needed]}

Critical reception

In the spring of 1989, Lance Olsen, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, included Shields as part of the “Next Generation of Fiction.”^[21] Shields has been referred to as "a pioneer of collage writing",^[22] the collage approach being referred by A.O. Scott as "experimental" in February 1996 in Newsday, in review of Shields' Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996),^[23] an approach that he reportedly began with Remote.^{[citation needed]}

A.O. Scott, in a later Shields review that appeared in Newsday (of his Black Planet in 1999), reflected on the earlier-published Remote (1996), suggesting that it should be seen as “one of the definitive texts of the 1990s—a trim, elegant nonfiction answer to [David Foster Wallace's] Infinite Jest."^[24]

Reality Hunger was highly controversial when it was published in 2010.^{[citation needed]} In The New York Times Book Review, Lucy Sante wrote that the book “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.”^[25] Reality Hunger has, in fact, proven extremely influential on 21st century nonfiction, “autofiction,” and documentary film.^{[editorializing][citation needed]} However, The New Yorker's James Wood called the book “highly problematic” in its “unexamined promotion of what [Shields] insists on calling ‘reality’ over narrative,” despite acknowledging that Shields's “arguments about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.”^[26]

In the decade since Reality Hunger, Shields has published a dozen books, many of which are collaborative.^{[citation needed]} Nearly all of them attempt to embody the ars poetica theorized in Reality Hunger.^{[editorializing][original research?][citation needed]} The first of these collaborations, Salinger, a 2013 biography co-authored with Salinger documentarian Shane Salerno,^[16] "subtly defied the conventions of nonfiction through its piecing together of an abundance of primary material",^{[original research?][citation needed]} was praised by John Walsh in the Sunday Times (London) as “a stupendous work"; Walsh goes on to "predict with the utmost confidence that, after this, the world will not need another Salinger biography.”^[27]

On the other hand, Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, refers to the Shields-Salerno volume repeatedly in less kindly terms (e.g., as a "bizarre book" with a "peculiar view of Salinger"), and proceeds to dissect major premise after major premise; one example is the volume's interpreting repeated appearance of the word "kills" in The Catcher in the Rye as evidence of "psychic violence in the book", missing the fact that it appears repeatedly as "Holden’s slang for the best things that happen to him", for instance, in his saying of his beloved sister, Phoebe, "She kills me.”^[28] Gopnik goes on to say,

Salinger’s work emphatically editorializes its moral point, which is about as far from celebrating or even sublimating violence as any writing can be... To make this view somehow its opposite is to refuse to read what’s there on the page.^[28]

Gopnik continues, noting that Ring Lardner was among the writers esteemed by Salinger, and he fails to make substantive appearance in the Shields-Salerno work, leading to the observation that such a book "with no Ring Lardner in it, one can say with certainty, is a book about something other than J. D. Salinger."^[28] Even more scathingly, this reviewer takes aim at the overarching documentary method employed, stating that the book

employs... a “clip-job”—the kind of celebrity bio [approach] where, in the guise of research, previously published work is passed off... as original discovery. Journalists who never met Salinger, old “friends” who saw him last in 1948, are quoted fragmentarily... while large... quotations are lifted out of other people’s published work and plunked right down alongside the rest, as though these writers, too, had stopped by for a chat. These unwilling contributors see their work chopped up and recycled...^[28]

leading Gopnik to note that "[g]ossip is offered interchangeably with fact, bald speculation is sold as though double-checked, [and] salacious rumor... is accepted with a shrug", such that readers "understandably assume that everything is, so to speak, on the same level".^[28] Gopnik concludes that this documentary work's subject "is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star", and that if one wants to understand Salinger's flight from the public eye and the New York publishing and literary world generally, with its "fanatic readers, eager biographers, disingenuous interpreters, [and] character assassination in the guise of 'scholarship'... [one] need only open this [Shields' and Salerno's] book".^[28]

Shields published War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict through PowerHouse Books in 2015,^{[29][independent source needed]} a book in which he "continued to transform and remix genre".^{[editorializing][citation needed]} Heather Baysa in the Village Voice^{[full citation needed]} called it a “disturbingly graphic book [that] follows the New York Times's war reporting for more than a decade, exposing the institution's tendency to glamorize armed combat to the point of manipulation."^{[This quote needs a citation]}

I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, a collaboration between Shields and Caleb Powell, was praised for its erasure of the boundary between mask and self, a frequent theme in Shields's work. In the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison wrote that the book's “goal isn't sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It's fodder for argument. To put the ‘I’ to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.”^[30]

Lynch: A History, whose montage approach builds off of the collage style of Shields's books, marks a new major shift in Shields's focus, to documentary film. In the New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote, “Lynch feels like the culmination of Shields's career. The film's relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you. Random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern. It's a gradient of American carnage.”^[31]

Books

• How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by (the Square Root of) Allan Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon, Sublation Books, 2024
• The Very Last Interview, New York Review Books, 2022
• The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, Mad Creek Books, 2019
• Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention, Thought Catalog, 2018
• Other People: Takes & Mistakes, Knopf, 2017
• War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict, powerHouse Books, 2015
• That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews, as told to David Shields, McSweeney's, 2015
• Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, co-edited with Elizabeth Cooperman, Hawthorne Books, 2015
• I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, co-written with Caleb Powell, Knopf, 2015
• Salinger, co-written with Shane Salerno, Simon & Schuster, 2013
• How Literature Saved My Life, Knopf, 2013
• Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, co-edited with Matthew Vollmer, W.W. Norton, 2012
• Jeff: One Lonely Guy, co-written with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan, New Harvest, 2012
• The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, co-edited with Bradford Morrow, W.W. Norton, 2011
• Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Knopf, 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: Notes Toward the New 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,^{[citation needed]} 1984^{[12][independent source needed]}

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role
2024	How We Got Here	writer, director, producer
2019	Lynch: A History	writer, director, producer
2017	I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel	co-writer, co-star

Awards and recognition

In a 2022 version of his faculty curriculum vitae, the award content of which is reproduced here, Shields represents that he has received the following awards (as of that year):^[32]

• Lynch: A History won the Golden SunBreak Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, 2019
• Lynch: A History was a finalist for Filmspotting's Golden Brick award for Best Low-Budget Indie Film of 2019, 2019
• Reality Hunger (2010) named one of the 100 decade-defining books, LitHub, 2019 ^[33]
• Royalty Research Fund Fellowships, The University of Washington, 2016, 2008, 2002, 1997, 1989
• Pabst Endowed Chair, Atlantic Center for the Arts, February/March 2015
• Artist Trust, James W. Ray Distinguishes Artist Award, 2015.^[34]
• One of Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year: I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (2015)
• Goodreads Choice Awards, finalist for best History/Biography, Salinger, 2013
• Artist Trust Innovative Arts Award, 2013
• &Now Awards: Best Innovative Writing, 2013
• Best American Non-Required Reading, 2012
• Reality Hunger: A Manifesto named as one of the best American essays of 2008 and one of the "Essayest American Essays" by Quotidiana
• 4 Culture Award, 2008
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 2005–2006
• Simpson Center for the Humanities Research Fellowship, University of Washington, 2005-2006
• Body Politic named as one of the best 25 books of the year by the Seattle Times, 2004
• Artist Trust Fellowships for Literature, 2003, 1991
• Silver Medal, Canadian National Magazine Award, for contribution to "Fifteen Ways of Looking at Vince Carter" in Saturday Night magazine, 2001
• Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, for Black Planet, 2000
• Finalist, PEN USA Award, for Black Planet, 2000
• Black Planet named one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, and Amazon, 2000
• First prize, Web del Sol creative Non-Quiction Contest, 1999
• Distinguished Author's Award, Brandeis University National Women's Committee, 1994
• Seattle Arts Commission Fellowship, 1992
• King County Arts Commission Independent Artist New Works Award, 1992
• PEN/Revson Foundation Fellowship, 1992
• National Endowment for the Arts, Literature Fellowship, Creative Writing, 1982, 1991.^[35]
• Residency fellowships: Corporation of Yaddo (3), MacDowell Colony (2), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (3), Ragdale Foundation (2), Millay Colony (Edna St. Vincent Millay Award), Cummington Community of the Arts, Centrum—1982-1991
• Washington State Book Award for Dead Languages, 1990
• Silver Medal, Commonwealth Club of California Book Awards, for Dead Languages, 1989
• Short story "Audrey" chosen as one of the "Ten Best" stories in the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and included with two others in a program of short fiction presented at The Library of Congress, 1989
• PEN Syndicated Fiction winter, 1988 1985
• New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 1988
• Ingram Merill Foundation award, 1983
• James D. Phelan Literary Award, San Francisco Foundation, 1981
• Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, 1980-1982