Other People

Takes & Mistakes

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Other People

By: David Shields

Narrated by: John Dellaporta

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About this listen

An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation.

Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: 70-plus essays, written over the last 35 years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields' sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities, and impossibilities, for human connection.

Essays

Most relevant

I really enjoy works by David Shields and was looking forward to listening to this on my commute, but the editing has made it impossible! Where the narrator makes an error and rereads a line, the original mistake hasn’t been deleted! I have no idea how this got to publication in its current state. It’s like a bad GCSE project.

Terribly edited

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