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 Other People: Takes & Mistakes, a book that is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five 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.