DavidShields
Called a troublemaker by his own publisher, David Shields uses his words and speech to be honest and truthful - in his own words “calling bullshit” whenever possible. With thirteen books to his name and the fourteenth, How Literature Saved My Life due out this February, David Shields has mined a particularly rich seam of non-fiction.
Reality Hunger, a Manifesto was a self-motivated attempt to align his teaching career with his personal interests in memory and the human animal. Compiled from a mass of quotations originally compiled for a university course reader, the resulting work was a curious hybrid of memoir, journalism and scholarly inquiry. Often compared to remix cultures more broadly, the book was controversial for its intentional lack of citations.
Shields continually shifts the weight at which we hold certain texts in an attempt to discover work that is most relevant to our present reality. Having overcome a childhood stutter, he has successfully demonstrated a powerful ownership of his speech and prose. He is effortlessly controversial.