Kristy Davis, O, The Oprah Magazine:

“Here is a mind on fire, a writer at war with the page. ‘I’ve sacrificed my life for art,’ says David Shields in an astutely titled, contrarian collage, How Literature Saved My Life. At age 56, Shields, the author of 13 books, seems to be asking, ‘Is that all there is?’ And yet these rigorous, high-octane, exhaustive yet taut ruminations on ambivalence, love, melancholy, and mortality are like an arrow laced with crack to the brain.”