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An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.
Alfred A. Knopf
March 2010
On Sale: February 23, 2010
240 pages
ISBN: 0307273539
EAN: 9780307273536
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook
dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his
landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York
Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One
Day You’ll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed
with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly
any. Most artistic movements are attempts to figure
out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is
reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic
movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace’s Ars
Poetica to Lars von Trier’s “Vow of Chastity.” Shields
has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of
interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms
and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and
artificial world, are striving to stay open to the
possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity,
spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer
participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking
larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and,
above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction
and nonfiction. The questions Reality Hunger
explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of
the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now
endless controversy surrounding the provenance and
authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces,
the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the
Rye, RobertCapa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the
boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a
rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about
“truthiness,” literary license, quotation,
appropriation. Drawing on myriad sources, Shields
takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought
over now and will be fought over far into the future. People
will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it
as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an
occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be
one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the
year.
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