DAVID SHIELDS
Wednesday, March 15, 2017 – 12:30pm
*In conversation with Kelly Corrigan*
Other People: Takes & Mistakes is an intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.
Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women’s eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields’s sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities, and impossibilities, for human connection.
*David Shields* is the internationally best-selling author of twenty books, including *The Thing About Life*, *Reality Hunger*, *Black Planet*, *Remote*, and *War Is Beautiful*. He and his wife live in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
*Kelly Corrigan* is the *New York Times* bestselling author of *Glitter & Glue*, *Lift*, *The Middle Place* and the Host of KQED’s “Exactly” as well as the co-founder of Notes & Words.