How to Keep Calm and Carry On
Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you. You play tricks on your mind.
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Posts Tagged: David Shields
Notable San Francisco: 9/27–10/3
Literary events and readings in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Truth and Beauty: Talking with Joshua Wolf Shenk
The new Editor-in-Chief of The Believer dismantles stereotypes of Las Vegas, discusses the magazine’s acquisition, and makes a case for bringing journalism into the academy.
...moreNotable Portland: 3/16–3/22
Thursday 3/16: Looking to discuss fascinating articles you’ve reading in a magazine or online site? Join Portland’s new Article’s Club—like a book club but with articles found in places like Vogue or the Atlantic. The Perlene, 6:30 p.m., free. Michael Eric Dyson reads from his new book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, […]
...moreAll About the Essay
John D’Agata, visionary champion of the essay and master anthologizer, sees the lyric form “partake of the poem in its density and shapeliness, it’s distillation of ideas and musicality of language.” He also sees it as unbound to conventional notions of truth. Writing for Harper’s, Elaine Blair critiques the genre-bending, exploratory practices of writers like David Shields, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rick Moody
Rick Moody talks about the newly collected writings of the elusive Reginald Edward Morse, Hotels of North America, and why fiction in general ought to lie more.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Way We Weren’t by Jill Talbot
None of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
...moreRemembering, Repeating, and Working Through
How do we begin to describe the indescribable? In McSweeney’s newest book That Thing You Do With Your Mouth, actor Samantha Matthews and author David Shields challenge the way we think about trauma by changing the way we talk about it. Read an excerpt of the collaborative text and watch the video trailer after the […]
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“Adams,” from Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity
A (very short) story by George Saunders, with an introduction by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman, excerpted from Life Is Short—Art Is Longer: In Praise of Brevity.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Shields and Caleb Powell
Writers David Shields and Caleb Powell can’t stop fighting, even about their new book-length argument and forthcoming film, I Think You’re Totally Wrong.
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The Rumpus Interview with Susanne Paola Antonetta
Poet and memoirist Susanne Paola Antonetta discusses literary bias, feminism, and the origin of her nom de plume.
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I Think You’re Totally Wrong by David Shields and Caleb Powell
Elisabeth Sherman reviews I Think You’re Totally Wrong by David Shields and Caleb Powell today in Rumpus Books.
...moreStranger than Fiction
The death of the novel has been argued and rebutted and argued again. Drawing from David Shields‘s book of literary criticism, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Alexander Nazaryan wonders whether the essay might do a better job: Reality Hunger argues that to survive, the novel must become less like itself, to just stop with the whole […]
...moreIn Defense of The Novel
For the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman responds to David Shields’s Reality Hunger, primarily using Anna Karenina to defend the powers of the novel.
...moreBill Murray and Me
Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution. Hence my iron grip […]
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The Rumpus Interview with David Shields
Essayist and lauded thinker David Shields talks about his new book, whether it’s necessary to draw sharp distinctions between literary forms, and his celebration of literature that collapses the distance between the artist’s life and work.
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“Fakes,” by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer
Receipts, letters, diaries, grocery lists, photographs, report cards, online dating profiles – all these documents are written evidence of our existence. For most of us, they will be the only written evidence of our existence. Creating fraudulent documents as a means of evoking a fictional character is an old technique, from Jonathan Swift’s letters written […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with David Shields (Paperback Edition)
The February 2010 publication of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields, generated an amazing amount of discussion from all sides.
...moreCendrars, The Extraordinary Daydreamer
Long before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from his grizzled lips and a swaggering nonchalance befitting only a soldier and a drifter, penned […]
...moreJonathan Lethem and David Gates Talk Facebook, Internet, The Future
“I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time e-mailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact—and I bet I’m not that unusual. If my characters were like that, would their lives be eventful enough to […]
...moreWhat Should The New Novel Look Like?
“Man is here, the world is there and the distance between the two lies at the heart of the new novel project.” — Andrew Gallix at The Guardian Book Blog reminds us to look at the work of the literary critic Alain Robbe-Grillet while we’re freaking out about David Shield’s Reality Hunger and the future of […]
...moreThe Resistance of Memory
Ander Monson attempts to move beyond “the singular authority of ‘I’ in nonfiction,” exploring new possibilities for the memoir form.
...moreNotable New York, This Week 3/8 – 3/14
This week in New York Sam Lipsyte reads from The Ask, David Shields reads from Reality Hunger, the Magnetic Fields perform, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks reads, Lore Segal and Tao Lin engage in a panel discussion about the novella, Stephen Elliott holds a writing class, Philip Gourevitch, Francine Prose and Lewis Lapham explore natural and man-made […]
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
In my (wow, it’s already been almost a) year here as Sunday editor at The Rumpus, I’ve never seen a week with so much incredible content. If you missed it, come take a peek.
...moreA Writerly Respect For Death
Now I realize it is a dazzling, sunny afternoon in San Francisco. People are no doubt reading books at Zeitgeist as I advised them to this morning. Children and dogs are cavorting in the parks. In fact, right now, I’m at a cafe that is holding a children’s musical recital. Not that I planned on […]
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