David Shields
| David Shields | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
July 22, 1956 Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Teacher, novelist, essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., M.F.A. |
| Period | 1984–present |
| Genre | Novel, biography, essay, short story, creative nonfiction |
| Website | |
| www |
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David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American author of fiction and nonfiction.
David Shields was born in Los Angeles in 1956. He graduated from Brown University in 1978 with a degree in English Literature. In 1980, he received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Iowa.
From 1985 to 1988, he was visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Shields is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. He is also a member of the faculty in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
Shields's first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. In 1989, he published his second novel, Dead Languages, about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words. His third book, Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (1992), marked a shift from traditional literary fiction to collage, the blurring of genres. This method continued in Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography (2002), and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008). Shields's next book, Reality Hunger (2010), argued for the obliteration of distinctions between genres, the overturning of laws regarding appropriation, and the creation of new forms. Shields's How Literature Saved My Life was published by Knopf on February 5, 2013. The same year saw the release of Salinger, an oral biography he wrote with Shane Salerno, who wrote and directed the documentary of the same name.
Much of Shields's work is a critique of categories in art and culture, such as the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.. In Reality Hunger, he argues for abandoning the traditional novel form because of its inability to deal with what he views as a fragmented culture.. Shields writes, "I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it's not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now." He advocates collage forms such as the lyric essay, prose poetry, and the antinovel.
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