How Literature Saved My Life (Hardback)
$24.66 - Save $1.29 (4%) - RRP $25.95 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for How Literature Saved My Life In his most wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, and painfully funny book, acclaimed writer Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature and blends confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography.
Full description- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Published: 05 February 2013
- Format: Hardback 207 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Memoirs | Literary Essays | Literary Studies: General
- ISBN 13: 9780307961525 ISBN 10: 0307961524
- Sales rank: 79,747
Other books
Full description for How Literature Saved My Life
"Reading "How Literature Saved My Life "is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form." --Whitney Otto In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal's "Pensees "to Maggie Nelson's "Bluets, " Renata Adler's "Speedboat" to Proust's" Remembrance of Things Past") to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his "ridiculous" ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants "literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this--which is what makes it essential." A captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing.
