Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity - Softcover

Shields, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299193640 ISBN 13: 9780299193645

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

Synopsis

In this truly one-of-a-kind book, the author/narrator&;a representative, in extremis, of contemporary American obsession with beauty, celebrity, transmitted image&;finds himself suspended, fascinated, in the remoteness of our wall-to-wall mediascape. It is a remoteness that both perplexes and enthralls him.
    Through dazzling sleight of hand in which the public becomes private and the private becomes public, the entire book&;clicking from confession to family-album photograph to family chronicle to sexual fantasy to pseudo-scholarly footnote to reportage to personal essay to stand-up comedy to cultural criticism to literary criticism to film criticism to prose-poem to litany to outtake &;becomes both an anatomy of American culture and a searing self-portrait.
    David Shields reads his own life&;reads our life&;as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.

Winner of the PEN / Revson Award?

About this title

About the Author

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Salon, A Public Space, Believer, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

James Franco's film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.

From the Back Cover

Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

"Remote should, in retrospect, be seen as one of the definitive texts of the 1990s . . . a mordant meditation on the odd way we live now-in the thrall of celebrity, at the mercy of the media, at once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice."-A. O. Scott, Newsday
"An idiosyncratic, droll, ravishing assemblage that both investigates and replicates the fragmented, irony-poisoned, celebrity-obsessed consciousness of fin de siècle America."-Kirkus Reviews
"In the current craze of personal and family memoirs, David Shields's Remote is unique. It's a mishmash, a potpourri; it's impersonal, it's embarrassingly revealing. It's very funny, and it tells us more than we want to know about American life."-Carolyn See, Washington Post
"The talented Mr. Shields gives us a clever collection of vignettes, descriptions, commentaries, and aperçus held together by the author's voice and a finely tuned sense of the absurd. . . . Remote is elliptical, funny, and ironic."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299193640
• ISBN 13: 9780299193645
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192