Reality Hunger is David Shields' argument against the conventions of the contemporary novel.

Composed of 618 numbered fragments, the book assembles quotations, observations, arguments and appropriated passages into a manifesto that deliberately refuses the distinction between original writing and borrowed material.

Shields moves through literary criticism, philosophy, autobiography, documentary, collage and the ethics of artistic appropriation, questioning why fiction remains so attached to traditional narrative structures when experience itself is discontinuous and difficult to contain. Writers including Proust, Beckett and Walter Benjamin become part of a larger argument about the exhaustion of conventional storytelling and the possibilities of literary forms that resist classification. The book's own construction performs its central provocation: that the boundaries separating fiction from nonfiction, invention from recollection, and authorship from theft may be far less stable than we would like to believe. An argumentative, occasionally contradictory work about what literature might become when fidelity to experience matters more than fidelity to genre.

Edition/Condition: Penguin Group Australia / Hamish Hamilton, 2010. First Australian edition, first printing, paperback. Good condition, with visible rubbing, light creasing and general shelf wear to covers. Interior pages appear clean and binding intact.