Read by Stephen Bowlby

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." "A delightful and utterly Shieldsian work…[The Very Last Interview is] a hilarious takedown of the interview process, of his own public persona, and of the journalists themselves, blessedly anonymous, who asked some of the most outrageously mean, out-there, self-important, stupid, and simply impossible questions imaginable…Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious." "I love David Shields's new book, which I read in one sitting. There is so much to think about-not just what's being said but the whole structure and conceit of the book. What is it-an interview? A memoir? A personal investigation? A meditation? Portrait of the artist as no longer a young man? The conversation is so beautifully presented: only one character speaks during the entire book, and yet it isn't a monologue. Very deftly, Shields makes the reader feel that the interviewee is answering every question or offering all kinds of information and clarification." "An autobiography in question form, with the reader working to supply the answers based on the questions that follow. Brilliant." "Shields has done something seriously stunning here. Beautifully, compactly hysterical. What for me is so powerful, amid the irony and comic bite and radiant constraint and brainy brightness in every sentence, are the questions behind every question: How did all this oldness grow inside us when we thought we were paying attention? How many miles do we still have to go on this gas tank? Remind me again: Why have I spent a lifetime doing what I'm doing? I love this book, which brilliantly breaks the reader's heart." "A sort of existential mixtape, and at the heart of it all is how others see us, what they imagine of us. 'Do you think anyone can understand anyone else, and if not, what are any of us doing other than walking around trapped for in eternity in our own space suits?' The Very Last Interview attempts to answer this question and at the same time complicates it in an utterly thrilling way. I love this book." "David Shields, the wild card in contemporary nonfiction, always challenges the presumptions of genre. His terrific new book, The Very Last Interview, is alternately hilarious, sad, and for any author, excruciatingly recognizable. By submitting to a self-inquisi

Mode of access: World Wide Web