in conversation with Patrick Nathan

Saturday, October 19, 2024
Talks Stage, 3:30pm

In his latest book, How We Got Here, groundbreaking author David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.  He’ll discuss how he arrived at this equation, and what we can do about it, with Minneapolis novelist and essayist Patrick Nathan.

About the Authors

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, and The Very Last Interview. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for his work, and has published essays and stories in the New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Huffington Post, among many others. The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017; since then Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as tools of resistance; co-wrote I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film produced by Mark and Jay Duplass and released in 2023; and wrote and directed How We Got Here. Visit him at davidshields.com.

Patrick Nathan is the author of Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist (2021) and Some Hell: A Novel (2018); his latest work, the novel The Future Was Color, is an exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb. He lives in Minneapolis. Visit him at patricknathan.com.