I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel

Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life; his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art. The stay-at-home dad (three young girls) and the workaholic writer (eighteen books) head to the woods to spend four days together in a cabin, arguing life vs. art.

I Think You're Totally Wrong is an impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate. Shields and Powell talk about everything--marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal, and (of course) writers and writing--in the name of exploring and debating their central question: the lived life versus the examined life. There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters of the universe--only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish.

James Franco's film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong, starring the authors, premiered in 2015.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); Other People: Takes and Mistakes is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2017. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Caleb Powell grew up in the Pacific Northwest, has played bass in a band, worked construction, and spent ten years teaching ESL and studying foreign languages on six continents. Now a stay-at-home father in Seattle, he has published stories and essays in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, Pleiades, and Whiskey Island Magazine.