The most generous reaction to David Shields’s recent books would be to assume they are straight-faced parodies in the vein of those performed by Joaquin Phoenix or Andy Kaufman, sly commentaries on the culture’s already rampant solipsism. But all signs are that he’s serious.

Mr. Shields has always injected himself into his works about broader subjects, which include an investigation of obsession with celebrity, a meditation on aging and death, and a novel that stars a stuttering boy whose condition resembles the author’s. But in his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” and in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” (2010), he has dispensed with the idea of having any subject but himself and what he likes to read.

“Reality Hunger” was an argument for literary mash-up and guilt-free copyright infringement. It was composed of hundreds of numbered excerpts from other people’s work, begrudgingly attributed to their original authors in an appendix. Mr. Shields blamed the presence of the citations on his publisher’s lawyers, and he suggested that readers cut out the pages containing them.

“How Literature Saved My Life” is, in many ways, a sequel. It begins with scattered pieces about Mr. Shields, including some play-by-play of his sex life that more than slakes whatever hunger might exist for that reality. Then it gets down to what has become his usual business, dismissing the conventional novel (he can’t imagine reading Jonathan Franzen) and memoir and championing art that blurs the idea of genre, interrogates the trustworthiness of memory and embraces the short attention span. (“I swear to God,” Mr. Shields once said in an interview, “I can’t read a book unless it has miniature numbered sections.”)