How to Write Literary Collage

Otherppl with Brad Listi

A new 'Craftwork' episode about the art of literary collage. My guest is David Shields, author of How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Zizek (Squared) Equals Bannon and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally, both of which are available from Sublation Media. Shields also wrote and directed a documentary film called How We Got Here, based on his book and available now on Prime and other platforms.

***Note: Here is a list of some of David's favorite works of literary collage.

Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Timesbestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields--a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions--has published essays and stories in New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

The film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 and is now available as a DVD on Prime Video.

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 (streaming on Prime, Peacock, AMC, Sundance, Apple, and many other platforms).

I'll Show You Mine, a feature film that Shields co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, was released in 2023 and is now available on Prime and several other platforms.

A new film, How We Got Here, which Shields wrote and directed and which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Zizek (squared) equals Bannon, is streaming now on Prime and several other platforms; the companion volume is forthcoming in September 2024.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

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