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| “Enough About You is an autobiography that complicates the process of autobiographical writing, of talking about oneself directly, at every turn...'Seamless' would be the wrong word for this book, but Shields's ability to weave a coherent and rather likable voice—ironic, self-implicating, blackly funny, hopeful—through these disjointed passages is impressive.” —Elaine Blair, Newsday |
| “Enough About You exudes a razor-edged, sad-sack sensibility that's hard to resist—like Jerry Seinfeld crossed with Lydia Davis or Maurice Blanchot. As with fellow creative nonfictioneers Hilton Als and Bernard Cooper, Shields's graceful prose makes a meal of ephemera.” —Joy Press, Village Voice |
"Shields's style is startling in its clarity and candor."
—The Oregonian | |
Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography
David Shields
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| Paper | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 192 pgs. | ISBN: 1-59376-219-4 | List: $14.95 | 01/1/2009 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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Featuring: Get the readers' group guide to Enough About You here:
http://www.softskull.com/files/eay_group.doc
About the book: Enough About You is a book about David Shields. But it is also a terrifically engrossing exploration and exploitation of self-reflection, self-absorption, full-blown narcissism, and the impulse to write about oneself. In a world awash with memoirs and tell-alls, Shields has created something unique: he invites the reader into his mind as he turns his life into a narrative.
With moving and often hilarious candor, Shields explores the connections between fiction and nonfiction, stuttering and writing, literary forms and literary contents, art and life; he confronts bad reviews of his earlier books; he examines why he read a college girlfriend's journal; he raids a wide range of cultural figures (from Rousseau, Nabokov, and Salinger to Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, and Bobby Knight) for what they have to tell him about himself; he quotes a speech he wrote on the occasion of his father's ninetieth birthday and then gives us the guilt-induced dream he had when he failed to deliver the speech; he also writes about basketball and sexuality and Los Angeles and Seattle, but he is always meditating on the origins of his interest in autobiography, on the limits and appeals of autobiography, on the traps and strategies of it, and finally, how to use it to get to the world.
About the author: David Shields's is the author of eight other books, including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College's low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, and Farsi. He was the chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel.
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