The Very Last Interview
2022
First Published
3.76
Average Rating
142
Number of Pages
"The Very Last Interview is a unique work, a lacerating self-examination that came about when David decided to gather every interview he ever did, going back nearly 40 years. If it was radio or TV, 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 collated and cut down to form 22 chapters focused on subjects that include 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 throughline." It's a ruthless self-dismantling in which the author, in this case, a late middle-aged white man, is strangely, thrillingly, not present. As Chuck Klosterman wrote about the book: "Logic suggests that people are best understood through the things they say, but that's not how the media usually work. People are actually defined by the questions they get asked (and the degree to which their answers can be framed to prove whatever was already assumed to be true).The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has brilliantly done for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong." The Very Last Interview is a sequel to Shields' seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. As Kenneth Goldsmith says, "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.""—
Avg Rating
3.76
Number of Ratings
82
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
David Shields
Author · 20 books
David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include 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, Believer, 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. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
