Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

OTHER PEOPLE: TAKES & MISTAKES

David Shields

An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.

Other People: Takes & Mistakes investigates a series of interrelated questions: Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? How do others live through us? Is the gap between people fillable? If not, how does or doesn't art fill that gap?

Other People: Takes & Mistakes, Shields's twentieth book, is something of a revelation. This is what he's been writing about, and toward, all along: 70-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined in order to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness.

David Shields has reconceived and recombined dozens of essayswritten over the last thirty yearsin order to form not a miscellany or a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The result, Shields's twentieth book, is something of a revelation. This is what he's been writing about, and toward, all along: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.

The book is divided into five sectionsMen, Women, Athletes, Performers, and Alter Egos. The topics range from sexual desire to information sickness, George W. Bush to Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses to Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell to Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism to the agony of first love, tattoos to bumper stickers. Throughout, Shields's focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible logjam of human interaction.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty books, including The Thing About Life (NYT bestseller), Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), Black Planet (NBCC and PEN USA finalist), and Remote (PEN/Revson Award). He and his wife live in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. His work has been translated into 20 languages.

Available products
Book Published 2017-02-01 by Knopf

Comments

Shields offers portraits of other people,' including family members, lovers, athletes, and celebrities. However, in these essays, Shields also frequently interrogates his notion of self, focusing a lens on his identity in relation to others. Readers . . . will enjoy this work by an established figure in the field.

A triumphantly humane book . . . Shields is our elusive, humorous ironist, something like a 21st century Socrates. . . . He's a master stylistand has been for a long time, on the evidence of these pieces from throughout his career. The collection can stand as a textbook for contemporary creative nonfiction: erudite, soulful and self-deprecating like John Jeremiah Sullivan; freewheeling and insatiably curious like Geoff Dyer; hilarious and precise like Elif Batuman; and always fresh, clean, vigorous and clear . . . The book's collective tone . . . is strikingly gentle, amiable and above all unpretentious. . . . All good writers make us feel less alone. But Shields makes us feel better. He takes some of the bad of our everyday life and our culture and the whole inescapable mess of being human and sends it back to us as good. Read more...

Wise, surprising, and relentless . . . At once an essay collection, a memoir and a critical dissection of pop culture and human relationships.

[Other People] showcases thirty-five years of endless curiosity . . . A smart, funny collection of observations, about himself and others . . . Engaging, daring, original.

A serious book on manhood in contemporary America . . . As brainy as Sebald or Kundera.

Brilliant and joyously readable . . . one of America's most accomplished and best writers. . . . In his certainty of getting other people wrong, David Shields is vastly more profound, entertaining, memorable and trustworthy than armies of writers whose presumptions of professional certitude and golden methodology are fatuous and mistaken to alarming degrees. Nothing David Shields writes should be ignored. Sometimes, as here, he is to be read as intently as any writer around.