“One of my enthusiasms of the moment is David Shield’s great and overlooked book Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography, just reissued by Soft Skull Press. Shield’s insights about the complex back-and-forth of fiction and fact in literature and our larger culture are remarkable. This new edition is introduced by documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, so I went back and watched his hilarious and amazing film Bright Leaves. Also, I was surprised recently while rereading Langston Hughes’s Best of Simple to see how much my new book, Fight Scenes, borrows a rough structure/form from that book, which has always been one of my favorites for its unpretentious, breezy style and moments of poignancy mixed with comedy and dark truths.”
—Greg Bottoms, author of Fight Scenes (Counterpoint, 2008)
Photo credit: Stéphane Najman