The Very Last Interview

by David Shields

In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have asked him over forty years.David Shields decided to gather every interview he’s ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields, “the real work rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line.”The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent. As Chuck Klosterman says, “The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong.”Shields’s new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “Just when you think Shields couldn’t rethink and reinvent literature any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since Burroughs.”

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to New York Review Books for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

You are now able to purchase this book anywhere you purchase books.

This book was not bad. Actually, I quite enjoyed it.

The premise of it is that Shields transcribed every interview he ever did but removed the parts in which he talked and only left in the parts of the interviewer talking.

It actually made it a bit more interesting. Because it makes you infer on what Shields would respond to the question. Would he be annoyed? Angry? Upset? Elated? We don't know.

Some questions made me so mad at how an interview has the idea in their brain to say something so horrible, some made me laugh out loud, and some just made my jaw drop.

There were some moments that I had to underline because it was just so funny or ridiculous.

"Are you, in essence, a ghost?"

Like what kind of question is that? Simply ridiculous. Or some that made my blood literally boil because I've had people ask me the same thing like:

"You weren't raised in a gulag or Nazi Germany or by wolves. When are you going to grow up, some may ask."

As a Jew myself, questions like this literally make me fume. This diminishing question that people think they won't offend.

While I did find some parts to be funny and some parts to be annoying, I do think that this book deserves some editing. Some parts could have for sure been left out. Which would slightly reduce the actuality of these interviews by redacting aspects of it, but would make it better if it was just ... cut out.

Editing definitely should have been done a bit more here, which does slightly reduce the rating of this. It just threw off the pacing and interest.

all in all: actually really good. for the interview/nonfiction lovers. 3.5 stars

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

are all writers bottoms?

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

frustrating and weird little memoir where the only active voice is anonymous interlocutors and interviewers, all of the actual “memoir” taking place in the negative space. formally: a success

[Simon Robs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars means I liked it, it was good and worth reading especially if you've read his (or some) of his other books, know his "schtick" -of sorts AND all the writerly/writer allusions sprinkled generously throughout. I don't think he had to work too hard at this book once the format was layed out - listing previously asked interview Q's that then lead to cultural/ philosophical/ metaphysical aspects of consideration to latest summation of collected nothings [in] particular. It reads in less than two hours and doesn't digress more than needed, but if this is last what comes next?

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good fun. As a (former) interviewer I winced at times, but mostly remembered that the interview isn't about the interviewer. Something that should be remembered a whole lot more often. This is a funny, weird little contrived absentee autobiography; an autobiography of what the work is alleged to stand for. Really enjoyed the ideas that swirl in here.

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually got nauseous reading some of the questions asked of the brilliant, lit, inimitable David Shields! Here are a few:
"Are you, in effect, a dead man walking?"
"Seven agents but only one wife? Interesting."
"Another way to ask this is, are all writers "bottoms"?
"Are you a self-terrorist"
"You may be weary of this line of questioning, but why do you keep writing about the same material over and over?"
"Essay" or therapy?

Absolutely blows my mind and yet, when considering humanity and what regurgitates out of their mouths, I am sad and disgusted and wonder how we let these idiots spray their spew! OMG!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny and depressing “memoir” of a sort based not on Shields’s disquisitions about his life but on the interviewers’ presumptions about Shields’s life. For The Very Last Interview, Shields extracted 2,000+ questions from 40 years of interviews with him, which he then organized into categories. The results are appalling for what they reveal about the character of the questioners and their seeming refusal to accept Shields’s own explanations for, say, his motivations, rather than those they came to the interview with. What the interviews presume to tell us is that Shields is a depressive Jew whose career has been on the skids for the past 20 years or so and whose life, at every point, has been haunted and debilitated by stuttering.

The Very Last Interview is an extended exercise in bad rhetoric and bad faith: Most questions have only “yes” or “no” as their answer, many of which also serve as leading questions, since the “correct” answer is already embedded in the questions themselves. At any point the interviewers receive answers contrary to their expectations, they are more interested in discrediting Shields’s opinion than they are in revising their own. Apart from their unwarranted assumptions, the questions also vary from the impertinent to invasive to insulting, and all are utterly asinine and inane.

If your books aren’t really seeing anymore—which more or less means that you no longer have a readership—then why, exactly, are you still writing them?

On Shields’s athletic adolescence and its sudden end:

Your broken leg—kind of a convenient excuse, don’t you think?”
It’s not as if you were destined to be Seabiscuit and then, after the broken leg, you suddenly became Stephen Hawking, is it?
There’s that hoary cliché about how sports teach people focus and hard work and discipline; you’re not going there, are you?”

On the quality of Shields’s teaching:

Ever taught a truly great course?
How about a single really excellent class?
How about a genuinely meaningful one-on-one conference with a student?
Perhaps you view teaching as nothing more than a day job?
A sinecure?
What’s your salary?
Seriously?
Seems to me a poor expenditure of taxpayers’ dollars, since what do the residents of the state actually get as a result?

On the trajectory of Shields’s career:

But you’re too old to change your life in any substantive way, wouldn’t you agree?
So—not to put too fine a point on it—has it been as wasted life?

Who wouldn’t be a depressive misanthrope dealing with such idiots? Back in 1960s, the cultural critic Dwight McDonald coined the phrase “phosphorescent quotation,” which for him signaled a new turn in American humor, a turn based not on traditional jokes or exaggeration but on straight-faced quotation of statements that are prima facie absurd to begin with—such as Eisenhower’s tautology, “Things are more like today than they’ve ever been before.” In that regard, The Very Last Interview emphatically glows.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been reading Shields since his first novel, "Heroes" (1984). Iowa, basketball, and an award winner - it interested me. I have read him off and on ever since. I have seen him have highs and lows. But, looking over the complete list of his titles in the front of this book, I realized I have not really enjoyed anything he has written ever since "Remote" (1996) - his fourth book, out of 22.
OK, really, the tough part is *answering* questions, not asking them. And it is obvious that many (most?) of these questions are ones he has asked/developed himself, not asked by others, s the book claims.
He presents himself as a bit of a loner, loose cannon, iconoclast, Post-Modern New Journalist - honestly it felt more like jottings. I know he spent time organizing these questions, not only into each chapter, but into an order within the chapter as well, but it does not seem to add much. Scattered. Rather light weight. Not the kind of thing that earns one a "Genius" grant, let alone a Nobel. (Well, we can all dream....)
And many of the "questions" are kind of like inside jokes. I have the feeling that the only way we'd know the answer to many of the questions here ("Did they really say that?" "Was that really in the email?") is if we not only read all 22 of his books (a dark hole I'll never go down), but his other ancillary work as well.
Dropping an author (or, in some cases, authors) name, and then brushing it aside with a quick, pithy remark reminds me of the line, "Opinions are like a**holes - everyone has one." It is not "criticism". Obviously well read, it is like he is incapable of sharing what he has learned from his reading with others. And I was somewhat aghast at the authors he identified himself with in terms of talent. Hubris. Or the authors he brands as only having medium talent (for example, his list of fellow stutterers who write).
"Asked" if he has added anything to literature or pedagogy, he kind of implies that he has - but never actually shares with us with that was.
And, well, 40 years ago I learned to distrust people who wear the badge of "I don't own a TV", and use the word "copacetic".
The good thing is this book really reads quickly. The bad thing is that over the 2 evenings it took me to read it, by the end of the evening I was anxious to be done with it. And rather bored.
But honestly, I find his jottings entertaining enough that I would not be surprised to find myself reading another of his books somewhere down the line.
2 out of 5 = "It was OK".

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Shields is an author who continues to fall under the radar of most readers despite a strong literary output. He seems to have painted himself into a corner with his seminal manifesto, Reality Hunger, 2010, which is a response to his view that the modern novel has become irrelevant, a view he has been asked to develop or defend ad nauseam.

Reality Hunger is a collection of unattributed quotes from different people. His publisher’s legal advisors forced Shields to give quotation credit at the end of the work, but—nevertheless—it stands as a manifesto of quotes as literature sui generis and as a life philosophy that incorporates influences from a wide realm of sources. It is eminently readable. Art as sound bites if you will. This technique, like Burroughs at his best or Kathy Acker at her best, works way better than any synopsis by me or another critic can make an eloquent clarification.

After a couple of minor works that are worthy reads, but which were remaindered almost immediately, Shields returns with a brilliant compendium piece to Reality Hunger, a small volume in which he reprints and organizes questions that he has been asked in interviews over his career. Only the questions and, most emphatically, not the answers. Shields’ silence is deafening and the result is an utterly brilliant and quick read which allows an author, even one who knows next to nothing about Shields, to learn all about him merely by reading the questions—often inane and pompous ones—that he has been asked over his career. The book is a statement on how an interviewer’s preconceived conceptions can lead an interview or frame an individual in a manner that the interviewer feels is “true”; Like Reality Hunger, The Very Last Interview is a manifesto on what is genuine, but by example and not via a pontificating, jargon-ejaculating philosopher. I could imagine the book being taught in an Intro to Law seminar or on rhetorical techniques.

Again, trying to clarify an artist who uses a collage or montage technique, particularly for literature, is difficult. The clarification will often sound trite. This slim volume published by NYRB most emphatically is not. Shields bares his life with excruciating honesty—as he is apt to do—but only insofar as others judge or classify him. The result has so many implications that a competent review or critique of the book would be at least threefold the length of The Very Last Interview.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was different. I guess the title lured me in at the library, but it might mean more to someone who has read his novels. Premise is that it's a compilation, organized by topic (capitalism, school, art,.........) of questions he has been asked in interviews, omitting his answers. Jacket copy alludes to his "rewriting and editing and remixing the questions and finding a through-line". Well, remixing is fine, but if you're rewriting and editing, then we don't know that these are actual interview questions you were asked, and some of them read as unbelievably rude or clueless.

So maybe better to think of it as a creative writer's experimentation with the offbeat form of trying to say something (usually sardonic) by projecting himself into the role of interviewer of the author. Results occasionally striking -- i gather he stutters, and some of the related questions were thoughtful -- but often boring, or over my head at least. What is he getting at with, for instance,

Do you like breathing?
Yes or no? (p. 95)

Might have to be on psilocybin to get into that and give it a lot of careful attention.

[Josh Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the tradition of Joe Brainard, Georges Perec, Édouard Levé, and — more recently Sheila Heti and Jesse Ball — Shields creates a cohesive text (I imagine he'd call it a collage) out of seemingly disparate sentences about himself. Unlike other entries in the form, though, these sentences are culled from interviews Shields participated in over the past 40 years and are not statements from him but rather questions posed to him by interviewers. Interestingly, I'd argue it's no less revealing about the subject despite this self-imposed distance. Decisions about what to include were made, for example. I enjoy how sometimes the questions are actually answers and also the weight of things left unsaid, which this work does a good job of capturing. It's also, to me, a nice skewering of the interview process itself, which is, of course, self-serving for authors but, as we see here, journalists as well. Anyways, the 40mg of Vyvanse I ingested 20 minutes ago has yet to kick in and out of concern of my own unmedicated incoherence, I'll stop here.

[Jakub Brudny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ciekawy koncept jednostronnego wywiadu zdaje sie wyczerpywać kilka razy w ciągu czytania, aż nagle autor uderza czytelnika kolejnym świetnym wykorzystaniem tego zabiegu. Całość zamyka się w roli autobiografii, lub czegoś na kształt mitologizacji własnego życia. Często miałem wrażenie że autor jest bardzo zrezygnowany, wykończony i nie do końca zadowolony z tego wszystkiego. Poza tym sam pomysł na to, żeby napisać książkę o sobie która koncentruje uwagę wyłącznie na tym o co inni mogą na mój temat zapytać jest chyba ostatecznym zwycięstwem stanów lękowych i przejmowania się opinią innych przez całe życie - jeśli nadinterpretuję to przepraszam, ale na pewno jest to myśl którą gdzieś tam miałem podczas czytania.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did David Sheilds write the flap copy to this formal autobiographical exercise? I mean, how could these questions be things that interviewers actually asked him? Does he think anyone will believe that? Isn't, though, his m.o. to question the veracity of the subjective? That being the case, can't we just view this as another form of self-interrogation and maybe self-absorption? Don't you find it interesting how we can appreciate a writer's adventurousness of form, but not necessarily their deceptively neurotic writing persona?

And why did I think it would be a good idea to give my take on this book in its own form? Do I think I'm really that clever?

[Neil Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fun one-sitting book. Think of it like the inverse of Joe Brainerd's "I Remember" or Édouard Levé's "Autoportrait", where instead of making a series of declarative statements from which you get a sense of the writer's soul, you instead get incessant questions, one after the other, apparently many cribbed or remixed from interviews in his past, which, entertainingly and paradoxically, answers a lot of questions about his life and place in our literary culture.

Also for admirers of David Markson, who Shields name checks several times in this.

[Jon Kapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quickly the reader becomes acutely aware that questions are never just that. Questions, are in fact, statements - or presumptions - especially as they are presented here - and loaded with judgement and intention.

Shields leaves the reader of The Very Last Interview with an interesting picture of the subject (himself) through these questions. But with no answers provided, we also have great space for interpretation drawn from our own imaginations....

[Chris]

Very funny. A collection of interrogatories directed at the author throughout his career. Together, they cast a shadow more on the critic, the audience, the questioner, than the subject. Who are we? What do we, can we, see?

[Ricky]

I thought this book was incredible. Just the way it was structured is very unique and artistic. It’s like a collage of different answers and interviews stitched together to present one unique story about the man behind the pen.

[J D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Shields
Start Here

[Leslie]

"21 new books hitting shelves this week," Lit Hub, 4/12/22

[Reagan Kapasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the concept of author compiling all the questions he was asked in his career and putting them into thematic chapters. Very clear intention, super fascinating.

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was this book fun for you?

Do you read Shields often?

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

When do you disagree with a question?

[Kelly Ferguson]

https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home...

Full review at link above.

I hate "stars" because that's a terrible system.

[Christa Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of fun to read. A compilation of questions the author has been asked in interviews.

[Carlton Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammering is of course our only and abiding intention?”

[Nav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow both a masterful demonstration of the power of silence as well as the written equivalent of a collage.

[Jasminum Mcmullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Shields never misses.

[p · Rating 4 out of 5]

no plot just vibes

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny and thought provoking, but the reader has to know the world of writing workshops and literary icons in order to understand the questions Shields uses to decimate contemporary culture.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neat and quick to read. A question tells as much about the person asking it as it does about the person answering.