Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018. The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019.

James Franco's film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.

A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, and the Loren Douglas Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.