Tuesday, March 23, 2010

A note on non-fiction...

a brief quote from David Shields, during his interview with the LA Times about the ideas and writing of non-fiction, that I really like...

"Memory is a dream machine. Nonfiction isn’t “true.” It’s a framing device to foreground contemplation, or at least it is in the nonfiction I love the most — nonfiction at the highest reaches of literary art. I want to redefine nonfiction upward — taking nonfiction’s limits and reframing them so that nonfiction can be a serious investigation of what’s “true,” what’s knowledge, what’s “fact,” what’s memory, what’s self, what’s other. I don’t want a nonfiction full of “lies.” I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world."

Wow.

Ps- I also want his new book:
http://www.davidshields.com/theWork.html


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