Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century. Author David Shields argues that our culture is obsessed with "reality" precisely because we experience hardly any. The questions Reality Hunger explores--the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real--play out constantly all around us. Think of the controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the "real": A Million Little Pieces, the Obama "Hope" poster, the boy who wasn't in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about "truthiness," literary license, quotation, appropriation. Shields has written this for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity.--