Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Books / Paperback
Books › Literary Criticism › Modern › 21st Century
ISBN: 0307387976 / Publisher: Vintage, February 2011
The author of the best-selling The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead presents a call for new art forms to match the complexities of the 21st century, exploring how creative expression is being reshaped to reflect today's increasingly artificial and disconnected world.
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A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead.Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
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