“David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.” —Jonathan Lethem

Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion—an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

Shields begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about himself and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers—from Lucretius to Woody Allen—yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family.

A book of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead will move readers to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.

David Shields earned his BA from Brown University in 1978 and received his MFA (honors in fiction) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1980.

He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant.

Shields lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in creative writing at the University of Washington. Since 1996, he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina.

His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, and Persian.