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David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American writer whose work blurs generic boundaries. He is the author of ten books and a contributing editor for the literary journal, Conjunctions. His latest book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, was a New York Times bestseller.

Biography
David Shields earned his BA from Brown University in 1978 and received his MFA (honors in fiction) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1980.

He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant.

Shields lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in creative writing at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina.

His work has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese and Farsi.

He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.

in The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
“Though written in language that feels entirely liberated from the tradition of letters, from the tone of authority, from the heaviness of history—a language that sparkles not like special stones in the depths but purely on the surface of things—though the writing feels and flows with an energy that is new, sensitive to the thin film of the present, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead sings a very old song. ‘Sing me something,’ said the angel to Cædmon, the author of the oldest poem in English. ‘Sing me frumsceaft,’ sing to me about creation, about the world, its origin and its end. The song that the cowherd sings to an angel is the song now sung by David Shields: the song about the human condition. With Shields, the song of creation speaks of no shelter, or a maker of that shelter; it's a song about exposure. If there is a leading theme in Shields’s work, it is exposure in a world where there is nothing left but humans, their bodies, fears, families. Not even the religion of literature offers us protection from the elements of reality. This is why Shields’s language is so clear, so transparent. Everything from the world makes its way through the words to the reader with little or no distortion. There is a trick to all this—but the trick works. That trick makes David Shields look like he is hiding nothing from the reader.” -Charles Mudede, The Stranger

in Dead Languages
"...the reader for the most part is carried along by the vivacity of the language and moved by the unsparing, often hilarious, honesty with which Jeremy confronts himself and his family. David Shields is an enviably talented writer, a stylist with a strong metaphoric gift and the ability to stage scenes of almost excruciating intensity." -New York Review of Books

in Remote
“In the current craze of personal and family memoirs, David Shields's Remote is unique. It's a mishmash, a potpourri; it's impersonal, it's embarrassingly revealing. It's very funny, and it tells us more than we want to know about American life.... Without stooping to anything like characterization or chronology. Shields gives us his life, an American life, perilously close to the ones we ourselves live." -Carolyn See, Washington Post

in Black Planet
"A risky and brilliant book.... It compares favorably to Frederick Exley's classic A Fan's Notes. It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness.. .. Shields [is] willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave." -Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times

Books

 * Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, forthcoming from Knopf, September 2009
 * The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Knopf, 2008 New York Times bestseller
 * Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, Simon & Schuster, 2004
 * Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2002
 * "Baseball Is Just Baseball": The Understated Ichiro, TNI Books, 2001
 * Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, Crown, 1999 (named a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award, also named one of the year’s ten best books of nonfiction by Esquire, Newsday, LA Weekly, Amazon)
 * Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, Knopf, 1996 (received PEN/Revson Award)
 * Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories, Knopf 1992
 * Dead Languages: A Novel, Knopf 1989, (received Governor’s Writers Award)
 * Heroes: A Novel, Simon & Schuster, 1984

Essays

 * “I Could Go On Like This Forever,” City Arts, June 13, 2008
 * “Memory,” Columbia, 2008
 * "Vertigo: Why we love to watch others fall," The Stranger, April 15, 2008
 * “Reality,” Lake Effect, Spring 2008
 * “Notes for Eulogy for My Father," New England Review, Spring 2008
 * “Reality, Persona,” Truth in Nonfiction, University of Iowa Press, David Lazar, editor, 2008
 * “Blur,” Fawlt, October 21, 2007
 * “The Trouble with Being Food,” Between the Lines, 2007
 * “Conversations with My Father: A Meditation on Life and Death,” nor, Spring 2007
 * “DS,” Willow Springs, Spring 2007
 * “Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About,” Northwest Edge, Summer 2006
 * "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead," Conjunctions, Spring 2006
 * "Spider’s Stratagem," Iowa Review, Spring 2006
 * "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," Believer, March 2006
 * "The Wound and the Bow," Believer, December 2003
 * "Retrofeminist of the Night," New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003
 * "Men and Games and Guns," Yale Review, July 2003
 * "36 Tattoos," Village Voice, October 16, 2002
 * "The Capitalist Communitarian," New York Times Magazine, March 24, 2002
 * "The Only Solution to the Soul is the Senses: A Meditation on Bill Murray and Myself," Tin House, Fall 2001 (reprinted in Cooking and Stealing:  Tin House Nonfiction Reader, Bloomsbury Press, 2004)
 * "Being Ichiro," New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2001 (reprinted in Tri-City Herald, September 16, 2001, and Japanese Playboy, January 2002)
 * "Baseball Is Just Baseball," McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, August 10, 2001
 * "Confession Begets Connection: Details of One Life Resonate with Another," Writers on Writingseries, New York Times, April 9, 2001 (reprinted in Writers on Writing, Volume 2, Holt, 2003)
 * "Story of Our Lives," Threepenny Review, Winter 2000
 * "Bob Knight, C’est Moi," Salon, September 27, 2000
 * "The Guilty Pleasures of Seattle," Salon, June 1, 2000
 * "The Good Father," New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2000
 * "On Views and Viewing," McSweeney’s, Spring 1999
 * "Are You Who I Think I Am?," Details, February 1997
 * If the Lyrics Are Sad," Harper’s, Volume 292, #1749, February 1996
 * "Optical Illusions," Vogue, April 1995; (reprinted as "Girls Who Wear Glasses" in Best American Erotica 1996, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996. Chosen by readers as one of top 100 favorites in Best American Erotica series, 2003)
 * "Life Is Elsewhere," Witness, Volume 8, #2, 1994
 * "Desire," Threepenny Review, #53, Spring 1993; (reprinted as "In the Film Womb" in Utne Reader, #59, September/October 1993, and as "Desire" in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, W.W. Norton, 1999)
 * "Information Sickness," Zyzzyva, Volume IX, #1, Spring 1993; (reprinted in Harper’s, Volume 286, #1717, June 1993, and in Utne Reader, #62, March/April 1994)
 * "The Big Board," Village Voice, July 10, 1990
 * "Father’s Day," Village Voice, July 25, 1989; Stories on Stage theatrical production of story, Chicago, 1996
 * "Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Nabokov's Speak, Memory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Iowa Review, Volume 17, #1, Winter 1987
 * "A Note on the Conclusion of 'The Dead,'" James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 22, #4, Summer 1985

Note: For complete list of essays, see David Shields' official website (link below).

Short Stories

 * “The Imaginary Dead Baby Seagull,” Conjunctions, Fall 2007 (an early version of this story appeared in Between C and D, Fall 1989)
 * "Boys vs. Girls," Witness, Fall 2005
 * "Deep Breathing," Nerve, March 25, 2004
 * "A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire," Conjunctions, Spring 2003 (reprinted in The Story Behind the Story, Norton, 2004)
 * "Homeland Security," Northwest Edge, 2003
 * "Properties of Language," Yale Review, July 2001
 * "Ice," Ploughshares, Spring 2001
 * "The Ecstasy of Looking: Six Proofs," Conjunctions, Spring 2000
 * "The Rachel Mysteries: A Trilogy," Nerve, July 20, 1999
 * "The Gun in the Grass at Your Feet," The Quarterly, #10, Summer 1989; reprinted in English at Work, Glydendal, Norway, 1994
 * "The Sixties," Harper’s, Volume 283, #1669, December 1991
 * "War Wounds," Conjunctions, #16, Spring 1991

Note: For complete list of short stories, see David Shields' official website (link below).

Critical Acclaim for The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

 * “A double memoir-commonplace book in which Shields presents his and his father’s life stories, lovingly encrusted with facts about aging and death (it turns out your soul doesn't weigh 21 grams after all, and your hair and nails do not keep growing postmortem) and quotations (‘After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death’—Emerson). The result is an edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage. ‘I want him to live forever,’ Shields writes, ‘and I want him to die tomorrow.’” -Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
 * “Mr. Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer. Approaching the flat line of the last page, we want more.” -Stephen Bates, The Wall Street Journal
 * “There are paragraphs so finely wrought, so precisely tuned to the narrow-band channels between reader and writer, that the caught breath of inspiration and the sighs of expiration leave us grinning and breathless. Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born. They made a great model when they made [Shields’s] father, and a reliable witness when they made the son. This diamond of a book—brilliant with homage and anecdote—might outlive them both.” -Thomas Lynch, The Boston Globe

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
Mr. Shields latest book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead was given a warm reception from literary critics and the American reading public alike. In February 2008, Thing About Life became a New York Times bestseller, and the rave reviews have kept on coming. According to Stephen Bates of The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer. Approaching the flat line of the last page, we want more.”

In this book, Shields takes a fairly clinical perspective on death and all the things associated with it, birth, adolescence, adulthood and aging, and counterpoints these facts about the human body with personal accounts of real human bodies. Because there is no formal narrative arc the book plays out more like a discussion than a memoir or anything else. Lev Grossman, of Time Magazine perhaps describes the book best: "“A double memoir-commonplace book in which Shields presents his and his father’s life stories, lovingly encrusted with facts about aging and death (it turns out your soul doesn't weigh 21 grams after all, and your hair and nails do not keep growing postmortem) and quotations (‘After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death’—Emerson). The result is an edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage. ‘I want him to live forever,’ Shields writes, ‘and I want him to die tomorrow.’”