I love this book and am reviewing it here after reading it for a third time. I keep this book by the bed to open now and then and read a chapter, jumping in at random in a way I suspect Shields would appreciate. While I'm not nearly as skeptical as Shields regarding the value of fiction, I do app...
When I started I hated the way it was written. Various quotes? How can that flow? It eventually worked out well but I bet I missed some context given that I didn't know many of those quoted and didn't want to spend time looking them up. Like others I liked Salinger's writings as a young adult so ...
Not a review, but an issue that cam up while reading this book that I'm not quite sure of what to make. I read this novel after reading Shields's recent memoir "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead" and noticed that there are about ten times where the exact same passages exist in ...
“David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.” —Jonathan Lethem Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly...
Real life AT A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated...
KNOPF Copyright © 2015 by David Shields and Caleb PowellAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Bor...
The book is written in the first person, but that I is the most deceptive, tricky pronoun. There are two of us. I’m a chronicler of this character at the center who is, but in a necessary sense is not, me. He doesn’t have my retrospect or my leisure. He doesn’t know what’s around the next bend. H...
Felawshipe is wrot amongst many fyne hypster pilgrimes. The pathwayes overflowe with dangley baddges. As the evenning aproacheth, hypsters hath desended upon our towne, drinnking our wyne as unikornes feast upon rayes of the sonne. O that marche day...