Anybody who's kept up with my blog (sup, Mom) knows that I've been reading a little bit of David Shields lately. What you don't know is how totally his books have bowled me over.

After one book in first person about an athletic icon and another in-progress about the death of a loved one, I was tired of bleeding on paper. Better to ponder David Shields' How Literature Saved My Life with critical distance.

How literature saved my life by David Shields Knopf, $25.95 February 4, 2013 What is it about? It is a series of short thoughts, personal essays...

From Flavorwire All you struggling artists and writers out there, take heart. It may seem like you’re just spinning your wheels at that random jo...

One of our go-to Monday morning reads (seriously, bookmark it) is The Days of Yore, a stellar blog that interviews artists of all stripes about the ti...

Memoirs have been called misleading, fraudulent, overly confessional and now are also deemed narratively non-rigorous and too easy to write.

What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett's own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.

"This is a book," Monson writes on his first page. "It is fixed in time, in space, in print, an artifact." His brain, however, represents "flux, motio...

David Shields, the author of the new book "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," came onto "The Colbert Report" to talk about his book and his quest to free c...

David Shields practices what he preaches. Aphorisms in the Nietzsche manner are the coin of the literary realm that surfaces in his manifesto, Reality Hunger.

The term essay itself has fallen into disfavor. Just mention the word and watch people's eyes glaze over, hear them stammer out apologetic platitudes and poorly veiled excuses.

The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Citation domesticates the work, flattens it, denudes, it, robs it of its excitement, risk, danger.

We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I'm on a plane, it's all I see...