Amazon.com Review
Sarah Manguso Reviews Reality Hunger
Sarah Manguso is the author of The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir, and two books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Read Manguso's guest review of Reality Hunger:
"I doubt very much that Iโm the only person whoโs finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shieldsโs own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I canโt name a more necessary or a more thrilling book. --Sarah Manguso
(Photo ยฉ Marion Ellinger)
Review
โA literary battle cry for the creation of a new genre, one that doesnโt draw distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, originality and plagiarism, memoir and fabrication, scripted and unscripted. . . . David Shields [is] brilliant, thoughtful, and yes, original.โ
โCathy Alter,_ The Atlantic_
โ_Reality Hunger _urgently 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.โ
โLuc Sante, The New York Times Book Review
โDavid Shields draws on a wide range of reference, mixing historical reports, personal events, discussions of new media, and literary quotations (some verbatim, others rejigged), to construct a protean polemic that is also an account . . . of his own mental life. . . . Most importantly, Shields knows how to provoke argument without needing to crush all opposition. Rather, the tussle between reader and writer over the nature of reality, the nature of the text we are reading, is itself the aesthetic experience he is after.โ
โTim Parks, The New York Review of Books
โGood manifestos propagate. Their seeds cling to journals and blogs and conversations, soon enough sprawling sub-manifestoes of acclamation or rebuttal. After the opening call to action, a variety of minds turn their attention to the same problem. Itโs the humanist ideal of a dialectic writ large: ideas compete and survive by fitness, not fiat. David Shieldsโs Reality Hunger has just the immodest ambition and exhorterโs zeal to bring about this happy scenario.โ
โSam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
โShieldsโs radical intellectual manifesto is a rousing call to arms for all artists to reject the laws ...