NYRB: David Shields presents "The Very Last Interview," with Laura Kipnis

Описание: David Shields joins us to present his new book, "The Very Last Interview," in conversation with Laura Kipnis. This virtual event, presented as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): https://www.communitybookstore.net/bo...

About the book:

David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.”

The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “'The Very Last Interview' is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.”

Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “Just when you think Shields couldn’t rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. 'The Very Last Interview' confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.”

About our guests:

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including "Reality Hunger," "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead," "Black Planet," "Other People: Takes & Mistakes," "Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention," and "Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power." Shields is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, and the Loren Douglas Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Laura Kipnis is the author of "Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis." Her previous books include "Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus," and "Against Love: A Polemic."