David Shields

Shields co-authored I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (2015), which was adapted into a film by James Franco in 2017. Shields co-edited Life is Short—Art is Shorter (2015) and wrote That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews, as told to David Shields (2015) and War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict (2015). More recently, Shields has released Other People: Takes & Mistakes (2017), Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention (2018), and The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power (2019).

Shields has made four documentary films: Fight of the Century, Blues on the Fourth of July, Burning Down the Louvre, and Lynch: A History, which premiered in June 2019 at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Saul Austerlitz of The Boston Globe applauded I Think You’re Totally Wrong as, “Outrageously entertaining . . . a warm, funny, and charming book that questions not only what it means to live for art but what it means to live.”

Clancy Martin in The New York Times said of Other People, “Shields goes on to develop a familiar thesis about human nature: that we are divided, vertiginous, self-deceiving beings who somehow, like good old Oedipus, can’t help using our strengths to destroy ourselves.”

Hua Hsu in The New Yorker said of Lynch: A History, that "the film’s relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you, as random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern. It’s a gradient of American carnage."

Reality Hunger received a mixed critical response. In The New York Times Book Review, Luc 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." In The New Yorker, James Wood criticized the book for being "imprecise", arguing that its favoring of "reality" over traditional fiction was "highly problematic." However, he said that Shields' arguments about the "tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken." Stephen Marche of The Los Angeles Review of Books reviewed Reality Hunger from a later perspective, saying, "Because of its premature birth, the critics who reviewed the book when it first came out largely missed the point" made by Shields "about how to write now, in 2017." Shaj Mathew of The New Republic praised Shields's shift away from traditional narrative to a style that "is a pastiche, a series of intentionally “plagiarized” aphorisms, presented without quotation marks." Newsweek stated that Shields "advocate[s] for some hybrid, a bricolage of true stuff and made-up stuff and thought and observation and rumination and conjecture."

In The Boston Globe, Eugenia Williamson wrote of How Literature Saved My Life, "In this wonderful, vastly entertaining book, he weaves together literary criticism, quotations, and his own fragmentary recollections to illustrate, in form and content, how art — real art, the kind that engages and reflects the world around it — has made his life meaningful as both creator and beholder." In New Statesman, Max Liu found fault with Shields' artistic stance: "Shields' books yearn for meaning but they're as mediated by performance as the culture they criticize. Shields relishes his role as controversialist ('Fine by me') and his weakness is less writing to please admirers than to deflect detractors."

Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity received the PEN/Revson Award. Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award. It was also named one of 1999's ten best non-fiction books by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, and Amazon.com. Reality Hunger was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications.

From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Shields has been Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington since 2010; he was a professor at the University of Washington from 1988 to 2010. Since 1996, he has been a member of the faculty in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, NC.

Shields's first novel, Heroes, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984. His second novel, Dead Languages, about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words, was published by Knopf in 1989. “A remarkable novel. A brilliant mixture of pitiless observation, excoriation, humor, love, and forgiveness.” (Towers, The New York Review of Books) Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (Knopf, 1992) marked a stylistic shift from traditional, linear fiction toward more collage-like work. “Handbook for Drowning painfully, accurately chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling.” (Rhoda Koenig, New York Magazine) This shift continued with Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (Knopf, 1996), Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (Crown, 1999), Enough About You: Notes toward a New Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 2002), and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008, New York Times bestseller). Shields's tenth book, Reality Hunger (2010), argued for the obliteration of distinctions between genres, the overturning of laws regarding appropriation, and the creation of new forms. Reality Hunger also criticized "conventional plot-driven fiction" and argued that the novel itself is losing touch with reality. Shields's How Literature Saved My Life was published by Knopf in 2013. The same year saw the release of Salinger, an oral biography he co-wrote with Shane Salerno, who wrote and directed the documentary of the same name. All of these books are examples of Shields's interest in "self-deconstructive nonfiction."

David Shields (1956) is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), 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 Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s 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 documentary film about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction 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. His books have been translated into two dozen languages.

David Shields, who was born in Los Angeles in 1956, graduated from Brown University in 1978 with a BA in English Literature, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude. In 1980, he received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.