A debate, nearly to the death, about life and art, cocktails included. And a soon-to-be major motion picture from James Franco! Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he’ s a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he has overcommitted to art. Shields and Powell spend four days together in a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine; they rewatch My Dinner with AndrE, Sideways, and The Trip, relax in a hot tub, and talk about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question: life and/or art. The relationship– and the balance of power– between Shields and Powell is in constant flux, as two egos try to undermine each other, two personalities overlap and collapse. This book seeks to demolish the Q&A format; it also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between ” reality” and ” fiction,” between ” life” and ” art.” There are no teachers or students, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universe, only a chasm of uncertainty. David Shields is the author of 16 books, including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ ll Be Dead and Salinger, both NYT bestsellers; Reality Hunger; How Literature Saved My Life; and Black Planet. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Miliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Caleb Powell, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, has played bass in a band, worked construction, and spent ten years teaching ESL and studying foreign languages on six continents. He’ s published stories and essays in Descant, Post Road and Zyzzyva. He’ s now a stay-at-home father in Seattle.

An instant New York Times bestseller, this “explosive biography” (People) of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the twentieth century is “as close as we’ll ever get to being inside J.D. Salinger’s head” (Entertainment Weekly).

This “revealing” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (The Wall Street Journal) oral biography, “fascinating and unique” (The Washington Post) and “an unmitigated success” (USA TODAY), has redefined our understanding of one of the most mysterious figures of the twentieth century.

In nine years of work on Salinger, and especially in the years since the author’s death, David Shields and Shane Salerno interviewed more than 200 people on five continents, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Their intimate recollections are supported by more that 175 photos (many never seen before), diaries, legal records, and private documents that are woven throughout; in addition, appearing here for the first time, are Salinger’s “lost letters”–ranging from the 1940s to 2008, revealing his intimate views on love, literature, fame, religion, war, and death, and providing a raw and revelatory self-portrait.

The result is “unprecedented” (Associated Press), “genuinely valuable” (Time), and “strips away the sheen of [Salinger’s] exceptionalism, trading in his genius for something much more real” (Los Angeles Times). According to the Sunday Times of London, Salinger is “a stupendous work…I predict with the utmost confidence that, after this, the world will not need another Salinger biography.”

Mesmerized–at times unnerved–by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating audiobook: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion–an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

Shields begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about himself and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers–from Lucretius to Woody Allen–yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family.

An audiobook of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead will move listeners to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.

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 began: 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 years: 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 Hunger: 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.”