Author(s): Wallace Shawn

Essay | USA

'Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking.' - Toni Morrison

Born in 1943 in New York, Shawn has been writing plays since 1967. He has also worked as an actor. As he says of himself, he can be seen as someone who has spent his life 'sunk deep in the not particularly grown-up world of pretending and make-believe, but one could also note that writing plays and acting both involve the close observation of human society and human behaviour'. In a way entirely unique to himself, Shawn here attempts to understand the social and political realities of his time, whilst also offering some of his thoughts about 'the relatively innocent and provincial activity of creating small imaginary worlds with made-up characters'.

His ultimate goal in the book is to determine whether people who are by nature self-indulgent, people who are intimately concerned with the pursuit of the beautiful, the pursuit of the aesthetically pleasing, can play a role in fighting against the horrifying injustice and vicious destructiveness that characterize our world.

'Wallace Shawn is a bracing antidote to the op-ed dreariness of political and artistic journalism in the West. He takes you back to the days when intellectuals had the wit and concentration to formulate great questions - and to make the reader want to answer them.' - David Hare

"Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle, Wallace Shawn represents, in our opinion-addled age, a vanishing ideal of the cosmopolitan sensibility. These wide-ranging essays are irresistible in their unique mix of compassion and acuity, moral passion and indifference to dogma." * Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide and Age of Anger *
"Wallace Shawn's essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing." * MICHAEL MOORE *
"Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative." * HOWARD ZINN *
"Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking." * TONI MORRISON *
"WS's manner is conversational but informed. He has a powerful sense, both as an actor and political essayist, of the extent to which our better selves are constrained by lines that have been written for us; by received ideas, the comforting deceptions of class, agency and so on. Behind most of these essays are questions about the unfairness of life to which the author responds -- fairly, I think -- without answers, only further questions of his own." * Will Eaves, author of Murmur *

Author Biography: Wallace Shawn is an American actor, voice artist, playwright, and essayist.