Essays by Wallace Shawn

From the Publisher

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.

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.

The Washington Post - Sarah Halzack

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…his observations about class and culture are searing—a reminder of the our complacency about the gaps between rich and poor, free and oppressed.

Kirkus Reviews

Personal and political essays from actor and playwright Shawn (Grasses of a Thousand Colors, 2009, etc.). The author delivers a curious collection of fraught essays addressing, in the main, the implications of living a privileged, comfortable life in a world largely populated by the desperate, hopeless and exploited. A self-described child of privilege-his father was a venerable editor of the New Yorker-Shawn ponders his culpability in a system designed to keep the elite fat and happy while millions starve, concluding that the enjoyment of those privileges can only be seen as monstrous. Readers hoping for a solution to this inequity should look elsewhere. Shawn is content to lament the dire state of the world from the vantage of his cozy existence in the world of arts and letters, scolding himself, and his audience, for his participation in such a wicked enterprise as contemporary society. Written in a faux-naive style aiming for a disarming, childish simplicity, Shawn's short essays become repetitive and ultimately numbing. There are, however, interesting and well-observed bits on such far-flung topics as the offensiveness of patriotism, pornography addiction and the plight of waiters in fancy restaurants. Shawn also includes pieces on his life and work in the ivory tower of the artist, including an erudite interview with poet Mark Strand and a look at the creative process behind his celebrated plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon, which, with its disquisitions on the relative morality of figures like Adolph Hitler and "ordinary" people, touches on the themes of his politically inclined writings. Shawn is an urbane, lucid prose stylist, but this slim volume fails to satisfy. Perhaps thedynamic volubility and self-absorption of erstwhile dinner companion Andre Gregory would have provided a bracing contrast to the politely despairing nuggets offered here. Well-intentioned and limpidly written, but thin and repetitive-a morsel, not a meal.

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