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David Shields is the author of more than 20 books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the most important books of the last decade by Lit Hub); The Thing About Life Is that One Day You'll Be Dead; Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award); and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview (New York Review Books, April 12, 2022) draws from every interview he has given over 40 years to compile a compelling series of questions.
Handsell your book to readers:
During the pandemic, an interviewer pummels me (I never answer). What do interviewer and interviewee believe in? What--at the edge of the apocalypse--does the reader believe in, with absolute conviction? If nothing, then what sustains us? If something specific--love, family, art, civic engagement, "god"--to what degree are any such consolations actually quite illusory?
On your nightstand now:
Eliot: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins"; Richard Burton, Diaries; Aleksander Wat, My Century; Pascal, Pensées; Montaigne, Les Essais; La Rochefoucauld, Maxims; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo; Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet; James Richardson, Vectors; Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought; Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness; Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain; Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Mira Gonzalez/Tao Lin, Selected Tweets; Margo Jefferson, Negroland; Jean Toomer, Cane; Anne Carson, Plainwater; Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's; Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl; Jean Stafford, A Mother in History; Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever; Maggie Nelson, Bluets; Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave; David Markson, This Is Not a Novel; Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; Roland Barthes, S/Z; Hilton Als, White Girls; Barry Hannah, Boomerang; Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock; Wendy S. Walters, Multiply/Divide; Annie Ernaux, Things Seen.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Mickey Mantle, The Quality of Courage. Not sure why he was thought to be courageous; because he had a lot of injuries and tried to play through them? Clearly ghostwritten and oddly moving.
Your top five authors:
Simon Gray
Leonard Michaels
David Markson
Renata Adler
J.M. Coetzee
Book you've faked reading:
Hmm. I remember pretending to have read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer by paraphrasing a blurb on the back of the book, and my (beautiful) college classmate called me out on this; she, too, had read the back of the book. So embarrassing. I later came to read Percy and love his work.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries (all four volumes). I'm truly an evangelist for this book, which I'm trying to get published in the U.S. (it's well-known in England).
Book you've bought for the cover:
Natalie Shields, Love, Floppy Disks, & Other Stuff the Internet Killed.
Book you hid from your parents:
My family wasn't like that; if anything, my parents hid books from me.
Book that changed your life:
Proust, In Search of Lost Time (see below).
Favorite line from a book:
"The agon, then." --from Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book.
I don't like this book or any of Durrell's work, actually, but I think this is one of the great lines ever; I love its (self-conscious, mocking, funny) embrace of the tragic.
Five books you'll never part with:
I must admit that of late I've moved around so much that I don't take physical books that seriously as fetishized objects. I'm constantly giving away books and buying new books. The books that I love are buried deep in my mind. Lawrence: "Better to know twelve books well than thousands of book passably."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I wish I could recover the innocent rhapsody with which I read Proust's In Search of Lost Time; it remains for me the best book ever written--I remember feeling that way in graduate school, but I must admit that I have trouble reading that book now. Not sure why.
What you believe is the key quote:
Flaubert: "The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it."