Episode 98 — David Shields: Collage, Confession & the War on Genre

pplpod Episode 98 dives into David Shields—the essayist–provocateur who turned collage into a worldview and made “nonfiction” feel newly electric. We trace the early sparks (Heroes, Dead Languages), the pivot to documentary intimacy (Remote, Black Planet), and the manifesto that changed syllabi and blood pressure alike: Reality Hunger. From there, it’s a reckoning with mortality (The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead), reading-as-autobiography (How Literature Saved My Life), and late-phase fusillades that splice politics, media, and self (War Is Beautiful, Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump, The Trouble With Men, The Very Last Interview). We break down his method—quote as scalpel, fragments as argument, appropriation as ethics—and the  ...