David Shields

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David Shields (b. July 22, 1956) is an American writer whose work blurs generic boundaries. He is the author of eight books and a senior editor for the literary journal, Conjunctions.

Contents

[edit] 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, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Persian.

[edit] Style

Shields often puts himself into his writing, but instead of just seeing Shields in his books, readers make discoveries about their own selves, using Shields as a lens. Shields employs a point of view in which everything is interrelated and connected to everything else in the world. This view, when combined with his tendency to play self-consciously with questions of identity, vicariousness, and communication, pushes the autobiographical beyond its normal confines until it becomes difficult to decide if his work should be classified as comedy, essay, memoir, fiction, fantasy, reportage, confession, cultural criticism, etc., etc. His work often is fragmented, due to his perception of life as something that does not adhere to a tidy narrative line. He persistently creates a mosaic effect that falls within a postmodernist tradition or anti-tradition.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

  • Heroes: A Novel, Simon & Schuster, 1984
  • Dead Languages: A Novel, Knopf 1989 , (received Governor’s Writers Award)
  • Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories, Knopf 1992
  • Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, Knopf, 1996 (received PEN/Revson Award)
  • 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)
  • "Baseball Is Just Baseball": The Understated Ichiro, TNI Books, 2001
  • Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 2002
  • Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, Simon & Schuster, 2004
  • The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Knopf, 2008

[edit] Essays

  • "A Note on the Conclusion of 'The Dead,'" James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 22, #4, Summer 1985
  • "Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Nabokov's Speak, Memory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Iowa Review, Volume 17, #1, Winter 1987
  • "Father’s Day," Village Voice, July 25, 1989; Stories on Stage theatrical production of story, Chicago, 1996
  • "The Big Board," Village Voice, July 10, 1990
  • "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)
  • "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)
  • "Life Is Elsewhere," Witness, Volume 8, #2, 1994
  • "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)
  • If the Lyrics Are Sad," Harper’s, Volume 292, #1749, February 1996
  • "Are You Who I Think I Am?," Details, February 1997
  • "On Views and Viewing," McSweeney’s, Spring 1999
  • "The Good Father," New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2000
  • "The Guilty Pleasures of Seattle," Salon, June 1, 2000
  • "Bob Knight, C’est Moi," Salon, September 27, 2000
  • "Story of Our Lives," Threepenny Review, Winter 2000
  • "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)
  • "Baseball Is Just Baseball," McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, August 10, 2001
  • "Being Ichiro," New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2001 (reprinted in Tri-City Herald, September 16, 2001, and Japanese Playboy, January 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)
  • "The Capitalist Communitarian," New York Times Magazine, March 24, 2002
  • "36 Tattoos," Village Voice, October 16, 2002
  • "Men and Games and Guns," Yale Review, July 2003
  • "Retrofeminist of the Night," New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003
  • "The Wound and the Bow," Believer, December 2003
  • "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," Believer, March 2006
  • "Spider’s Stratagem," Iowa Review, Spring 2006
  • "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead," Conjunctions, Spring 2006
  • "Vertigo: Why we love to watch others fall." The Stranger, April 15, 2008

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

[edit] Short stories

  • "War Wounds," Conjunctions, #16, Spring 1991
  • "The Sixties," Harper’s, Volume 283, #1669, December 1991
  • "The Gun in the Grass at Your Feet," The Quarterly, #10, Summer 1989; reprinted in English at Work, Glydendal, Norway, 1994
  • "The Imaginary Dead Baby Sea Gull," Between C and D, Volume 5, #3, Fall 1989
  • "The Rachel Mysteries: A Trilogy," Nerve, July 20, 1999
  • "The Ecstasy of Looking: Six Proofs," Conjunctions, Spring 2000
  • "Ice," Ploughshares, Spring 2001
  • "Properties of Language," Yale Review, July 2001
  • "Homeland Security," Northwest Edge, 2003
  • "A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire," Conjunctions, Spring 2003 (reprinted in The Story Behind the Story, Norton, 2004)
  • "Deep Breathing," Nerve, March 25, 2004
  • "Boys vs. Girls," Witness, Fall 2005

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

[edit] References