Kindle Customer:
This book is a manifesto, a call to arms, a war on the novel that no longer matters. This book encourages a new form, a novel that is lived art and art lived. Shields wants AutoFiction that disguises itself as a novel and novels that barely disguise themselves as autobiography. Nothing in this world of 24 hour news and melting time is real, all nonfiction is, in fact, fiction. Nothing remembered is true, our memory is the greatest author of fantastic fiction we could ever hope to read. Go out and live your art and bring back the results, put them on the page and see your art truly lived. This book is a great read and I encourage anyone who dreams of writing a book someday to pick it up and commit this treatise to heart. Go buy it now!
United States on Dec 02, 2019
sarbe:
a fun read
United Kingdom on Feb 22, 2017
Steph:
Was required for a course but found it to be a very informative read
Canada on Sep 23, 2016
Robert Westdale:
Something I go back to periodically. Interesting work.
Canada on Jan 26, 2015
Cora Duncan:
A life-changing book. For anyone interested in the future of art, music or writing, this is a must.
United Kingdom on Nov 22, 2014
Rutherbooks:
A book that practices what it (most certainly) preaches: Shields' provocation is that fiction is dead, that all reality is subjective, and that all artists copy or steal. To that end, the text comprises some 600 aphorisms composed into an argument about literature, essays, journalism and documentary. Flawed, repetitive and on occasion snide, it's tone makes the author (compiler) hard to like. But when one considers the formulaic nature of much three-act story-telling, the self-referencing of "my-life-as-a-writer" fiction, and the ascendancy of the documentary form in recent cinema, he may well be onto something. Thought-provoking and eclectic.
United Kingdom on Oct 09, 2011
Gridley:
We've suddenly entered an age of choices - as least it seems sudden in retrospect - and this book is not so much a manifesto as a proclamation of the author's personal choices regarding literature.
It seems here that society suffers, not from an overdose of reality, but from a desperate need for a dose of such magnitude.Reality Hunger is a collection of loosely linked epigrams, sound bites, and personal vignettes that extol Shields' perspective on the field of fiction versus non-fiction. The best way to depict this book is though Shields' own pithy statements:
"Painting isn't dead. The novel isn't dead. They just aren't as central to the culture as they once were."
"Everything processed by memory is fiction."
"Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?"
"...I still feel that the writer and the reader can jettison the pages leading to the epiphany."
"I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation."
The above bon-bons are only a sampling of where Shields wants to take us in this book. Some of his insights are philosophical, some leaning heavily...
United States on May 13, 2010
Lee R. Sachs:
This is not an easy read. And it's infuriating for many reasons. These are good things. The fact that we need an author to slap us around like this is a sign of the times. But so is the fact that a writer can do this, do it well and just happen to open up new doors and windows. It's also an awkward read, made even more awkward by the Kindle. And to add my meta-media-technological experience, I actually read it on Kindle for the iPad. I forced myself to read it in sequence like a real book, without flipping to the appendix to find out who these quotes are from. Maybe that made it harder.
Having read the book proper, the problem then became bouncing from the appendix to the actual text back and forth ... a miserably slooow exercise on the Kindle/iPad. A real book would've been a hell of a lot easier.
There's a mysterious feeling to the voice of it all. At times it's uneven and other times hangs together like the lyrical essays he cites. The voice seems almost disembodied. Add to that, a portion of the book addresses the voice of the author in fiction and non-fiction, character and first person, narrative vs. essay. Around some of those...
United States on May 12, 2010
BTrain:
I really enjoyed Shields' previous book and thought this one would be more of the same but it really isn't. Shields assembled the book by piecing together quotes from lots of different sources and organizing them into different chapters dealing with different subject matters. It was very interesting to read but at the same time challenging.
It was challenging because it never really seemed to transition into a rhythm or flow since I always wanted to stop and flip to the end-notes to see where the quote was from and when I did that it seemed to break my coherence of the argument the chapter was trying to piece together. (Shields' insisted on putting the citations in the end-notes rather than in-line with the text.) I tired to force myself to just look things up after I read a whole chapter and that seemed to help a bit but didn't quite solve things for me for some reason. Overall I felt like I was watching a 500-channel TV with a remote and a bad case of ADD or something. It just felt like the method didn't translate well to the medium.
Overall it was an interesting experiment that others might find really interesting but I found to be hard to...
United States on Apr 22, 2010
| David Shields' Manifesto on the Craving for Authenticity: Reality Hunger | Uncovering the Real-Life Inspiration Behind Ernest Hemingway's Classic Novel: The Sun Also Rises | Exploring the Global Impact of Joseph Conrad's 'The Dawn Watch': An Analysis | |
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| B2B Rating |
79
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96
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93
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| Sale off | $1 OFF | $3 OFF | $2 OFF |
| Total Reviews | 1 reviews | 32 reviews | 9 reviews |
| Publisher | Vintage; unknown edition | Mariner Books; Reprint edition | Penguin Books; Reprint edition |
| Short Stories Anthologies | Short Stories Anthologies | ||
| ISBN-13 | 978-0307387974 | 978-0544944435 | 978-0143111047 |
| ISBN-10 | 0307387976 | 0544944437 | 0143111043 |
| Language | English | English | English |
| Best Sellers Rank | #37 in Philosophy Aesthetics #77 in General Books & Reading #1,061 in Short Stories Anthologies | #435 in Artist & Architect Biographies #990 in Individual Artists #1,380 in Author Biographies | #406 in Emigrants & Immigrants Biographies #3,005 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies #3,427 in Author Biographies |
| General Books & Reading | General Books & Reading | ||
| Philosophy Aesthetics | Philosophy Aesthetics | ||
| Item Weight | 7 ounces | 10.5 ounces | 11 ounces |
| Dimensions | 5.24 x 0.61 x 7.94 inches | 5.31 x 0.9 x 8 inches | 5.49 x 0.85 x 8.22 inches |
| Paperback | 240 pages | 368 pages | 400 pages |
| Customer Reviews | 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 211 ratings var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when.execute { if { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative { if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when.execute { A.declarative{ if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } }); }); | 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,266 ratings var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when.execute { if { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative { if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when.execute { A.declarative{ if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } }); }); | 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 265 ratings var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when.execute { if { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative { if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when.execute { A.declarative{ if { ue.count || 0) + 1); } }); }); |
United States on Sep 25, 2022