Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club, the reality version. I'm here with Troy Patterson, Slate's wonderful TV critic. This is Megan O'Rourke. It's one of Slate's culture critics. Hello, Troy. Hi, Megan. Hi, Troy. And our special guest today, Jody Rosen Slate's wonderful music critic.

Hello, Jody.

Hello, Megan.

Today we're talking about reality hunger, a manifesto by David Shields.

And there's a lot to get into with this book, which is a nonfiction book.

It calls itself a manifesto.

I think one of the things we should ask ourselves is whether it really is a manifesto. And it's arranged in 618 sections in chapters going from A to Z, from

overture to Coda. And one of the distinguishing qualities of the book is that many, many, many of these fragments

or these paragraphs are borrowed almost verbatim in many cases verbatim from other writers,

so that we have a kind of palimpsest of quotation arranged in such a way it suggests

as to make an argument about our relationship as artists to quote-unquote reality.

Just to give our listeners a taste of what the beginning of this book sounds like, the very

opening lines say, every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure

out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. A couple lines down, Shields writes, my intent

is to write the Ars Poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a multitude

of forms and media, lyric essay, prose, poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance

art, rap, stand-up, comedy, graffiti.

We're breaking larger and larger chunks of quote reality into their work.

That quotation mark, I think, is something we're going to have to ask ourselves some

questions about.

So big claim here and a big statement about what the book is going to do.

So I think it's worth untangling. One of the things I felt about the book was that there were a lot of different strands all tangled up.

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