Reality Hunger

“Provocative, brain-rewiring.… A book that feels at least five years ahead of its time and teaches you how to read it as you go.”

—Alex Pappademas,
GQ

“Maybe he’s simply ahead of the rest of us, mapping out the literary future of the next generation.”

—Susan H. Greenberg,
Newsweek

“A work of virtuoso banditry that promises to become, like Lewis Hyde’s
The Gift
for earlier generations, the book that artists in all media turn to for inspiration, vindication, and altercation as they struggle to reinvent themselves against the headwinds of our time.”

—Rob Nixon,
The Chronicle of Higher Education

“A rare and very peculiar thing: a wake-up call that is a pleasure to hear and respond to.”

—Geoff Dyer

“This dude’s book is the hip-hop album of the year.”

—Peter Macia,
Fader

“I don’t think it would be too strong to say that Shields’s book will be a sort of bible for the next generation of culture-makers.”

—David Griffith,
Bookslut

“One of the most provocative books I’ve ever read.… I think it’s destined to become a classic.”

—Charles D’Ambrosio

“Voracious and elegantly structured.… Entertaining, insightful, and impressively broad.… An invigorating shakedown of the literary status quo: recommended for readers, essential for writers.”

—Scott Indrisek,
Time Out New York

“Shields has put a bullet in the brain of our ridiculously oversimplified compulsion to think of everything as a narrative.”

—Paul Constant,
The Stranger

“Might be the most intense, thought-accelerating book of the last ten years.”

—Chuck Klosterman

“Shields has a point. He gives a damn. He’s trying to make a difference. He’s using the best of his formidable talents to do that.”

—Wayne Alan Brenner,
The Austin Chronicle

“Witty, insightful, and compulsively readable. Every page abounds in fresh observations.”

—Lydia Davis

“This is the book our sick-at-heart moment needs—like a sock in the jaw or an electric jolt in the solar plexus—to wake it up.”

—Wayne Koestenbaum

“Absorbing, even inspiring.… The ideas [Shields] raises are so important, his ideas are so compelling, that I raved about this book the whole time I was reading it and have regularly quoted it to friends in the weeks since.”

—Jami Attenberg,
Bookforum

“Brilliant. It keeps the reader alert and attentive and excited through sheer intelligence, epigrammatic concision, wit, and sheer rightness, as when a pronouncement is so correct that it just pulls all the clouds aside.… There’s a feeling of the imminence of violence in these perceptions. This is a great compliment.”

—Charles Baxter

“Thrilling to read, even if you disagree with much of it.”

—Zadie Smith,
The Guardian
(London)

“Shields says things here that I have thought, wished I thought, wished someone would say. A sparky, brainy, passionate, often very funny, and never small-hearted or pinch-minded book: rigorous, demanding but generous and searching and self-debunking.”

—Patricia Hampl

“I love this book and am amused to see some of the hysterical reactions it’s provoked—proof, I think, of its radical truthfulness. Shields is utterly uninterested in providing intellectual comfort; he bravely, uncompromisingly delivers the news.”

—Walter Kirn

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Appendix