Reality Hunger A Manifesto [Paperback]

A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead.

Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.

Praise for David Shields’sReality Hunger

“A literary battle cry for the creation of a new genre, one that doesn’t draw distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, originality and plagiarism, memoir and fabrication, scripted and unscripted. . . . David Shields [is] brilliant, thoughtful, and yes, original.” —The Atlantic
 
“Reality Hungerurgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum, and have just been waiting for someone to link them together. . . . [It] heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.” —The New York Times Book Review

The merely literary questions, however, the questions for readers and writers, are not what distinguishReality Hungeras the truly necessary book that it has become. Shields identified a spiritual state that has come to dominate American culture as a whole. —Stephen Marche,The Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“David Shields draws on a wide range of reference, mixinlŽ