The National Basketball Association is a place where, without ever acknowledging it, white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. In Black Planet, David Shields explores how, in a
In this truly one-of-a-kind book, the author/narrator—a representative, in extremis, of contemporary American obsession with beauty, celebrity, transmitted image—finds himself suspended, fascinated, in the remoteness of our wall-to-wall mediascape. It
Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get will get an anthology; a course’s worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision,
In That Thing You Do With Your Mouth, actress and voice-over artist Samantha Matthews offers—in the form of an extended monologue, prompted and arranged by New York Times bestselling author (and Matthews’s cousin once removed) David Shields—a vivid
Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) to make life sur
An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate, about life and art-cocktails included.Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he's a stay-at-home dad to three young girls). David Shi
Contemporary short stories enacting giddy, witty revenge on the documents that define and dominate our lives.In our bureaucratized culture, we're inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of
"To be up all night in the darkness of your youth but to be ready for the day to come...that was what going to Brown felt like." -Jeffrey EugenidesIn celebration of Brown University's 250th anniversary, fifty remarkable, prizewinning writers and artists w
