The Very Last Interview
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years.
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writer Shields (Reality Hunger) rounds up questions he's been asked over four decades in this meandering collection of queries that go unanswered. Some are standard interview fodder about the process of writing: "Do you write every day? Do you have a ‘schedule?' " Some are hilarious attempts to fashion a literate take on pop culture—"Do you now wish you had gotten a PhD so you could be discussing Roland Barthes on Racine rather than Bart Simpson on his kegger?" or "But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature' that you envision?" Some of the questions zero in on Shields's childhood ("Did Joan Baez really sing at your sixteenth birthday party?"; "Who was little Davy Shields?"), while others meander over philosophical topics ("Why is the human animal so sad?"; "Why are we so melancholy"). There are requisite questions about the relationship between writers and critics, and the usual riffs on a writer's reading habits. It's full of rambling ruminations and surrealistic fluff, but the onslaught of questions does offer insight into the art of interviewing—in some instances, the interviewer is obviously more interested in their own perspective, while in others it's clear the questioner has thought deeply about their subject. This falls squarely between the absurd and the clever.
