The Trouble with Men

Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power

By: David Shields

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Paperback | 25 February 2019

At a Glance

Paperback
156 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 0.91

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David Shields's The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint. While unashamedly intellectual, it's also irresistibly readable and extremely moving. Over five increasingly intimate chapters, Shields probes the contours of his own psyche and marriage, marshalling a chorus of other voices that leaven, deepen, and universalize his experience; his goal is nothing less than a deconstruction of eros and conventional masculinity. Masterfully woven throughout is an unmistakable and surprisingly tender cri de coeur to his wife. The risk and vulnerability on display are in the service of radical candor, acerbic wit, real emotion, and profound insight-exactly what we've come to expect from Shields, who, in an open invitation to the reader, leaves everything on the page.

Industry Reviews

"David Shields's new collection of essays, The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, is a blistering and brilliant quintet of reportage and observations from the forefront of the five parts of our lives suggested by its subtitle. . . . The confessional explosions that play themselves out in this book are equal parts terrifying, edifying, and beautifully troubling. . . . The Trouble with Men is a difficult book to embrace, a problematic book to pin down, but that's the point. Shields might be a literary boxer, jabbing at us as we try to spar with him, a tender shot to the kidney or a harsh connection to the jaw, but at times he's also a master patchwork quilt artist. . . . Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power are the eternal quintet that has burdened and uplifted us, and in the masterful hands of David Shields they're illuminated in a dangerous, brilliant, eternal light." --Christopher John Stephens, PopMatters

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