The Very Last Interview

<b>In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book <i>Reality Hunger</i>&#160;David&#160;Shields&#160;has composed a mordantly funny relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years.</b><br><br>David Shields decided to gather every interview he&#146;s ever given going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast he transcribed it. He wasn&#146;t sure what he was looking for but he knew he wasn&#146;t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him&#151;approximately 2700 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 &#147;the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.&#148;<br><br>The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author&#151;in this case a late-middle-aged white man&#151;is strangely thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says &#147;<i>The Very Last Interview</i> 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.&#148;<br><br>Shields&#146;s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal <i>Reality Hunger: A Manifesto</i> which <i>Literary Hub </i>recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith &#147;Just when you think Shields couldn&#146;t rethink and reinvent literature any further he does it again. <i>The Very Last Interview</i> confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.&#148;