The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Shields, David

ISBN 10: 0739359282 ISBN 13: 9780739359280

Publisher: Random House, 2008

Synopsis

Inspired by his elderly father's vitality and optimism, the author of Remote offers a personal meditation on mortality as he chronicles his own life and that of his family from cradle to grave, integrating biological details with cultural history and criticism, philosophical speculation, and quotations to furnish a portrait of human existence as revealed through a single family. Simultaneous.

About this title

Review:

So pure and wide in its implications that I think of it almost as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth (Jonathan Lethem)

Breathtaking . . . Shields had us laughing out loud, even in the face of death (Timeout, Chicago)

Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born (Thomas Lynch Boston Globe)

Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer (Wall Street Journal)

About the Author:

David Shields is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Black Planet (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). A senior editor at Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Yale Review, The Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0739359282
• ISBN 13: 9780739359280
• Binding: Audio CD