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David Shields's Reading List

The essayist and novelist David Shields, whose forthcoming book is “The Very Last Interview,” used to idolize Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” But these days it “feels to me sort of twee. … I need more comedy, more urgency, more white space.”

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By the Book: David Shields (2022)

NYT By the Book column (2022-03-24).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Cover of Things Seen
Annie Ernaux · Buy on Amazon
"Annie Ernaux, "Things Seen," which pretends to be a casual diary about nothing in particular but is in fact a sustained meditation on the relationship between private disequilibrium and public violence."
Cover of Life of Johnson
James Boswell · Buy on Amazon
"one of the greatest books ever written (also one of the funniest, saddest and strangest)"
Cover of The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton · Buy on Amazon
"another, equally great, long, sad and strange book"
Cover of The Complete Smoking Diaries
Simon Gray · Buy on Amazon
"It's one of my favorite books ever written — it's easily my favorite book written over the last 20 years — and my goal in life is to see it published "properly," as Gray would say, in the United States."
Cover of The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams · Buy on Amazon
"I'm interested in the critical intelligence in the imaginative position, self-portraits in convex mirrors, autobiographies by any means necessary."
Cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Cover of Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Cover of Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick · Buy on Amazon
Cover of Negroland
Margo Jefferson · Buy on Amazon
Cover of The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa · Buy on Amazon
Cover of The Rings of Saturn
Cover of Cane
Jean Toomer · Buy on Amazon
Cover of The Pharmacist's Mate
Amy Fusselman · Buy on Amazon
"almost all of my favorite books have been recommended to me by Paul or Aaron Strumwasser or Alexis Nelson or other students and former students."
Cover of Essays and Aphorisms
Arthur Schopenhauer · Buy on Amazon
"He's so gloomy that he makes me giddy."
Cover of The Temptation to Exist
E. M. Cioran · Buy on Amazon
"I love to (as it were) death."

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