Showing results by author "David Shields" in All Categories

Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump. It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the “collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump”, and above all as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse - a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump.

In October 2011, Jeff Ragsdale, a down-and-out actor and stand-up comedian, posted a flyer around Lower Manhattan asking people to call him if they wanted to talk. He thought he’d get a dozen calls; instead he got hundreds, and then thousands, once pictures of the flyer went viral on the net. The calls came from all over the country and from as far away as Spain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Taiwan, and Australia. Jeff spoke to as many people as he could, answering his phone all day long.

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.

Actress and voiceover artist Samantha Matthews offers - in the form of an extended monologue, prompted and arranged by New York Times best-selling author (and Matthews' cousin once removed) David Shields - a vivid investigation of her startling sexual history.