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

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.

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.