Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: 70-plus essays, written over the last 35 years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Shields' sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities --- and impossibilities --- for human connection.

Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life, whereas his former professor, David Shields, always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art. Shields and Powell spend four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, talking about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal --- and, of course, writers and writing.

In the eight years since SALINGER was begun, and especially in the three years since J.D. Salinger’s death, David Shields and Shane Salerno interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, and more.

Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, David Shields explores the power of literature to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. He evokes his deeply divided personality, character flaws, woes, and serious despairs. Books are his life, but when they come to feel unlifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness and self-consciousness.