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The Very Last Interview Audiobook
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Publisher Description
In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years.
David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, 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 condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as 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 through-line.”
The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years: interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.”
Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “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.”
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“A hilarious takedown of the interview process, of his own public persona, and of the journalists themselves, blessedly anonymous, who asked some of the most outrageously mean, out-there, self-important, stupid, and simply impossible questions imaginable…Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“Shields maintains a playful and absurdist tone that pokes fun at the conventional Q and A, a staple of journalism that gives way here to the Q minus the As.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Manages to be both a conceptual work and a revealing self-interview; it’s also very funny.”
— International Times -
“It’s full of rambling ruminations and surrealistic fluff, but the onslaught of questions does offer insight into the art of interviewing…This falls squarely between the absurd and the clever.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Incredibly enjoyable to read, but not just a fun ride. The bullet-like ideas hide more complicated ideas, like string theory behind the Tilt-a-Whirl.”
— Susan Daitch, award-winning author of Siege of Comedians
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About David Shields
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes. Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Salon, A Public Space, Believer, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
About Stephen Bowlby
Stephen Bowlby has worked as a professional voice actor for more than forty years. His experience spans animation, character work, commercials, and narration. He has read numerous audiobooks throughout his career, including titles by Harold Robbins, Stuart M. Kaminsky, John Sculley, William P. McGivern, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.