David Shields
Thursday, October 1, 2009

“The Writer’s Story,” 3:30PM, Garfield Book Company
Reading, 5:30PM, Ingram 100


David Shields's most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight previous books, including 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. Past awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.



The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

Inspired by the immense vitality of his 90-something father, David Shields captures the arc of a human life in order to come to terms with mortality. Organized into four stages of life-infancy and childhood, adolescence, adulthood and middle age, old age and death-Shields's short, snappy chapters are crafted from personal anecdotes (many featuring his wife and teenage daughter), literary-philosophical musing and enlightening scientific data, examining a wide range of human concerns relating to "the beauty and pathos in my body and his body and everybody else's body as well." Shields also visits historical and contemporary figures, from Sigmund Freud to John Ruskin and Woody Allen, for their thoughts on mortality; says Picasso, "One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it's too late." Shield's eclectic approach and personal voice makes this extended meditation on living and dying a pleasing and profound read.


“Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer.”

—The Wall Street Journal


“Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born.”

—The Boston Globe


“An edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage.”

—Time


“A primer on aging and death for those who take theirs without the sugar. . . . There's a comfort to be found in this sober investigation of mortality, in Shields's clear-eyed look at the ways in which we come undone.”

—Esquire