“Reality Hunger”

You can say a lot of things about “Reality Hunger,” but one thing’s for sure: you can’t say it doesn’t apply to you. David Shields’s self-proclaimed “manifesto” is about nothing less than our desire for reality: memoirs, essays, reality television, and DJ sampling, to name a few. According to Shields, novels are on their way out, and essays are coming in. Author of “The Thing about Life Is That One Day You Will Be Dead,” Shields is unflinching in his call for, as Booklist calls it, “the new art paradigm for the participant-driven Internet zeitgeist, where art and life entwine in one big, loud reality show.” In a special to The Seattle Times, Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett says, “Shields made me defend/upend my views.” Luc Sante, writing for The New York Times, calls Shields “a benevolent and broad-minded revolutionary”: “His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.”