Prose Reading by David Shields

Is fiction relevant any more? Maybe not, argues David Shields in his controversial new book,Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which serves as a call to writers everywhere to “get real.” In the past, Shields’ ingenious, often hilarious, nonfiction has tackled topics like mortality, celebrity, and race and the NBA, while his fiction has dealt with identity issues, family relationships, and stuttering. He is the author of eight previous books, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and Dead Languages, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, he is a contributing editor of Conjunctions magazine and lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. Shields’s work has been translated into ten languages.