Essays (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

“Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality... politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt, and art as a force for change (or not)...It’s a treat to hear him speak his curious mind.”—O Magazine

“Wallace Shawn is the first to admit that he's got it pretty good...But he's hardly congratulating himself. Instead, Essays is refreshingly self-aware and self-deprecating, with Shawn depicting himself as an undeserving everyman with unusually good luck. Often the result is very funny.”—Washinton Post

In these beautiful essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey in which the personal and political become one.

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the “unobtrusives,” the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings. He grasps contradictions, even when unpleasant, and challenges us to look, as he does, at our own behavior in a more honest light. He also finds the pathos in the political and personal challenges of everyday life.

With a sharp wit, remarkable attention to detail, and the same acumen as a writer of prose as he is a playwright, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand—and change it.

Praise for Wallace Shawn and Essays: 

“Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought provoking, I enjoyed it tremendously.”—Toni Morrison

“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, author, A People’s History of the United States

“Wally Shawn’s essays are both powerful and riveting. How rare to encounter someone willing to question the assumptions of class and the disparity of wealth that grows wider every year in this country. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.”—Michael Moore, film-maker

“Wallace Shawn’s career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensible, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here. The basic faith of politically progressive people, that human beings are full of decent impulses perverted by political and economic malevolence, is in Shawn’s writing held up to the liveliest, sharpest scrutiny imaginable; not, as in so much reactionary art, to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed, or from artifice to Nature, not to insist that we’re innately, inescapably incapable of change, but rather as a scrupulous accounting of the slippery ethics, dream logic, fear-ridden resistance to progress, disturbing desires, of the greatest problem confronting all our hopes for a better, transformed world: Us, the actors in our collective drama. His essays are without sentiment and entirely resistant to the easy comforts of despair. Complexities are rendered delightfully plain, obfuscations are unsnarled and illuminated, clarity and rational thought are organized to plumb mysteries, and mysteries are respected and celebrated. Shawn’s language, his unmistakable, original voice, felicitous, is unadorned, elegant, immediate, true. He’s also a brilliant interviewer, as everyone who’s seen My Dinner With Andre (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, he’s very funny.”—Tony Kushner, playwright, Angels in America

“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, playwright

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor (Star Trek, Gossip Girl, The Princess Bride, Toy Story). His plays The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce have recently been produced as films. He is co-author of the movie My Dinner with Andre and author of the plays The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Grasses of a Thousand Colours. Friends call him Wally.

 

About the Author

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His plays The Designated Mourner and The Fever have recently been produced as films, and his translation of Threepenny Opera was recently performed on Broadway. He is co-author of My Dinner with Andre, and the author of The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, among other works.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 186 pages
• Publisher: Haymarket Books (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608460029
• ISBN-13: 978-1608460021
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49,984 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Reluctant Mystic", October 16, 2009

By	J. Brennan (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It would be a wonderful world if we were all more like Wallace Shawn. I attended a conversation between Shawn and author Bruce Wagner at West Los Angeles' Hammer Museum of Art on a recent Wednesday evening promoting "Essays." It was an outstanding pairing, though it ended somewhat abruptly due to the discomfort caused by an outburst from Wagner in response to insulting comments from the audience. Still it was a memorable evening, resembling an alternate version of "My Dinner With Andre," with Wagner playing the antithesis of Andre Gregory.

In this version Wagner dubbed Shawn "the reluctant mystic." The discussion that ensued that evening was an appropriate preface to reading (or rereading since most have been previously published) Shawn's outstanding collection of essays. These show Shawn to be a "reluctant mystic," a man of faith.

Shawn writes about art, theater, politics, family, and sex. Noam Chomsky basically sums up Shawn's thesis in their interview when he states, "Its simply very easy to subordinate oneself to a worldview thats supportive of ones own interests." How to un-subordinate, or figure out how to live ethically in subordination, is Shawn's dilemma and our own. "Well," Shawn claims, "the first thing we have to do is face it."

I am very comfortable with the way Shawn faces the world. It's an elegant stance of thought and noble ideals. As Shawn notes in his one-person performance, "The Fever," many are well acquainted with interior identity, intentions. "Were prisoners of self-love." It is the exterior identity, what we actually do, which is less familiar. It is also less interesting and lovable. "We understand the crimes of others but cant understand our own." Even if we understand them we can't endure the correction.

Shawn confessing to being a "killer," his awareness of his interior identity, did not cause discomfort to those attending the Hammer presentation and it will not greatly disturb those reading "Essays." Such interior awareness is soothing. The audience discomfort was caused by Wagner's non-apologetic stance that more honestly depicted the way most in that privileged audience live, or "do."

A telling moment that evening, which caused the crowd to grumble in disgust at Wagner, but reflects the tenor of "Essays," arose following Shawn's recollection of sitting in a restaurant and wondering why he was being served and not the other way around. Wagner rebutted that perhaps the waiter was quite happy in his role as server, implying that those serving and those being served were serving each other. The audience, perhaps on their way to an exquisite meal in Westwood, found this untenable.

Shawn reluctantly admits to walking down the street in foreign lands comforted by the knowledge that the United States military can overpower any nation's forces. We are perhaps comforted by believing that those who serve must envy those they serve. If not all the efforts those who read Shawn's essays have made to become the served have been for naught. If such musings are of interest "Essays" is an outstanding read. I left it thinking what a wonderful world it would be if Wallace Shawn could be like Wallace Shawn.
The Fever (Evergreen original)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The beauty and mystery of the worlds of dreams and reality, October 30, 2009

By	Keith Rosenthal (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This short work is divided into two parts linked by a common pursuit of the Moral Self in a chaotic world of war, poverty, inequality, but also beauty, love, and wonder.

The first part, "Reality," is more explicitly centered around the 'political' side of Wallace Shawn. Never losing his uniquely poetic voice, Shawn describes the evolution and development of his worldview as a child of privilege who comes to feel restlessly uncomfortable with the accepted absurdities and inequalities of his world.

Self-consciously torn between feeling a duty to exalt the hierarchy that has blessed him so, yet abhorring the war, misery, and national aggression that it necessarily produces, Shawn reveals to the reader a man genuinely struggling to "live morally" in a world wrought with obstacles, traps, and incongruities.

From the Vietnam war to Israel's attack on Gaza in 2008, this section is somewhat free-wheeling and informal, but nonetheless poignant.

The second section, "Dream-World," focuses more on Shawn's 'aesthetic' side. He talks about how it was that he came to be drawn towards the theater--and writing plays in particular; what he sees as the role of art in 'softening the human soul;' and his views on the special niche that poetry fills in the world of letters.

The most interesting piece in this section I found to be the one addressing Shawn's obsession with writing about sex. Clearly sex is a topic of contradictory standing in our society: on the one hand, it's used to sell hamburgers, but on the other hand, it's deemed as something really not appropriate for 'polite conversation.'

Wondering how it is that something so pleasurable could be so alternatively shunned and fetishized, Shawn puts forth a number of theories that the reader may or may not agree with, but will definitely find entertaining.

All in all, this is one of those books that gives true meaning to the notion of an artist "bearing their soul to the world."

(If you're interested in this book, you might also like:
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers
Notes from the Middle World
Hopes and Prospects
The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said
The Portable John Reed

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another side of Wallace Shawn, October 21, 2009

By	Shirley R. Reynolds (Seattle) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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For those who love Wallace Shawn's plays, here is another side of this brilliant man. His superb intellect with palpable sensitivity is on every page. Well worth the read.