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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

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."
James Boswell · Buy on Amazon
"one of the greatest books ever written (also one of the funniest, saddest and strangest)"
Robert Burton · Buy on Amazon
"another, equally great, long, sad and strange book"
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 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
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."
E. M. Cioran · Buy on Amazon
"I love to (as it were) death."

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