- David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.
The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships, Shields-a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions-has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays.
His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 and is streaming on Fandango at Home. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime and Apple TV). I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film that Shields co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, is also streaming on Prime and Apple TV.
On February 23rd, 2027, Autofocus Books (in partnership with NYU Press) is publishing David Shields’s 26th book, Failure Is the Only Subject: On Documentary Film and a Life Coming Undone, which is about how Shields-undergoing intensive psychoanalysis in the aftermath of his divorce and in the throes of an addictive new relationship-pieces his life back together, just barely, by obsessively watching and rewatching documentary films about human disappointment. What happens when the mask slips and we wind up in direct touch with the abyss within, and is there any way for us to learn to live with such harrowing knowledge?
- IMDb mini biography by: David Shields
- SpousesLaurie Shields(1993 - present) (separated)Laurie Shields(1990 - ?) (separated)
- After I screened the film in Los Angeles last summer, the Oakland rapper Ise Lyfe came up to me and said, "No black kid in Oakland would see Marshawn's refusal to talk to the media as anything other than standing up to the police." And now here we are. I'm thrilled and grateful that the film is now available on SVOD from Topic. I've been a fan of First Look for decades.
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