"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 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
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Caveat emptor: these witty, ironic, and observant essays by Wallace Shawn are brought to audio in a shoddy production with such poor sound quality that listeners may justifiably demand their money back. The microphone skips in and out so that parts of Shawn's narration are almost completely lost. In a reproduction of the 2004 interview that Shawn conducted with MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, the volume modulation varies so widely in the interview's second half that listening becomes irritating and difficult. (And the narration itself is confusing: Shawn plays Chomsky while Brian Jones plays Shawn, a role reversal that will sound bizarre to listeners who have already spent more than an hour with Shawn reading as himself.) Advice to Shawn's many fans: buy the hardcover of these worthy essays or seek out the pieces online; free versions of some are available on various Web sites or even on youtube.com. A Haymarket hardcover.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors, among other works.
More About the Author
"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 The Oprah Magazine
4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format: Hardcover
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 "baring 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
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format: Paperback | Amazon Verified Purchase
Shawn's essays are a spatter of thoroughly enjoyable commentaries and completely generalized drivel. It feels as though the good and bad show themselves in alternating fashion throughout the book. The interview with Chomsky was extremely enjoyable however the essay in which America is stated to be founded through genocide or the assumption that George Bush's actions are solely due to his thirst for human blood appear as idealized simplifications tailored towards a particularly biased crowd. This work was at times refreshing but at others just a dressing up of basic sociological issues like class conflicts or identity. Shawn is a very entertaining conversationalist and playwright but should avoid venting on paper.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format: Hardcover
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, "It's simply very easy to subordinate oneself to a worldview that's supportive of one's 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. "We're 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 can't 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)
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars A clear-eyed look at contemporary America & our questionable place...
While these are all fairly short essays, there's not a wasted word in them. Wallace Shawn has plenty to say, which he does in what at first seems to be an almost faux naif style --... Read more
Published 9 months ago by William Timothy Lukeman
1.0 out of 5 stars Maudlin meanderings of a mediocre mind
The moment most useful in this book is the flicker of self-awareness when Shawn identifies himself as a protected bourgeois. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Interrobang
5.0 out of 5 stars Essays Wally Shawn
Shawn's essays are designed to make the reader question his own assumptions. They are to the point and honest observations by an author who thinks well ahead of the herd.
Published 24 months ago by Sims McCutchan
5.0 out of 5 stars Essays, Thought Capsules over Time
Wallace Shawn, who plays ubiquitous characters in films, is a writer that stands alone in the literary and art world. Read more
Published on March 4, 2011 by Patrick R. Saunders
5.0 out of 5 stars W. Shawn Revives a Lost Art
I remember going to high school with Wally Shawn, and seeing him constantly huddled in conversation with Jon Schell and others, and wondered wistfully what deep ideas they were... Read more
Published on January 28, 2011 by Katherine Cameron
5.0 out of 5 stars simplicity at it's best
In a recent reading by Wallace Shawn, he admitted outright that he is not the most politically informed or socially-entrenched person out there. Read more
Published on July 5, 2010 by HalfAndHalf
4.0 out of 5 stars Compassion and Gentle Wit
Many of Wallace Shawn's 13 brief essays and two interviews (with poet Mark Strand and linguist Noam Chomsky) were published in The Nation, which indicates which side of the... Read more
Published on April 18, 2010 by Dr. Debra Jan Bibel
1.0 out of 5 stars Drivel in costume
I was looking forward to this being amusing and original. Instead within the first ten pages he suggests that he a man of many talents, a renaissance man, that his deep well of... Read more
Published on November 7, 2009 by Seneca
5.0 out of 5 stars Another side of Wallace Shawn
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.
Published on October 21, 2009 by Shirley R. Reynolds
5.0 out of 5 stars An Intriguing and Thought-Provoking Essay
Earlier today I saw and heard Wallace Shawn read from his new book, Essays, on Book TV (C-SPAN2). He read from Chapter Nine: Up to Our Necks in War. Read more
Published on October 11, 2009 by John
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