Showing results by narrator "John Dellaporta" in All Categories

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.

When Heroes was first published 33 years ago, the Los Angeles Reader called it “almost a parody of the modern American novel”. And it is indeed exactly the kind of conventional, linear, realistic, old-fashioned novel that David Shields came to disavow and argue against. But Marrow Books is proud to bring Heroes back into print, because (like so much of Shields’ work, from Remote to Black Planet to Reality Hunger to War Is Beautiful) it has proven to be uncannily prescient.