Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Just as we were reading the American galley proof of Reality Hunger, David Shields’s stupendous counterblast to all conventional literary pieties, Zadie Smith’s new essay, written in part in response to the book, dropped into our in-box. As she writes in ‘The Lure of the Essay’ – to be published in the Guardian next month – Reality Hunger is a thrilling read. We bought the rights and will be publishing it alongside Knopf in the US in February 2010.
Perhaps best summed up as an open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the 21st century, the author sets out to demolish the artificial wall between fiction and non-fiction and to chart the rise of a new “truthiness” in which writers are increasingly responding to an unbearably artificial world by breaking ever larger chunks of “reality” into their work.
Circulating as a proof ahead of publication the book already has endorsements from Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody and a host of others, including Frederick Barthelme, who asks: “Why is this man always writing the most interesting books? I think he is not from our country.”
Read more at www.davidshields.com