David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season  (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

 The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays.

His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 and is streaming on Fandango at Home. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime and many other platforms)). I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film that Shields co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, is streaming on Prime and many other platforms. A new film, How We Got Here, which Shields wrote and directed and which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by (the square root of) Allan Bloom times Žižek (squared) = Bannon, is streaming on Prime; the book of the same name was published by Sublation Media in 2024, as is that book’s sequel, A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk into a Trump Rally . . .

On February 3, 2026, Autofocus Books is publishing David Shields’s 26th book, Failure Is the Only Subject, which is about how Shields—undergoing intensive psychoanalysis in the aftermath of his divorce and in the throes of an addictive new relationship—pieces his life back together, just barely, by obsessively watching and rewatching documentary films about human disappointment. What happens when the mask slips and we wind up in direct touch with the abyss within, and is there any way for us to learn to live with such harrowing knowledge?