Essays »

Wallace Shawn is the author of "Our Late Night" (OBIE Award Best Play) "Marie and Bruce", "Aunt Dan and Lemon", "The Designated Mourner", "The Fever", among other plays, and the screenplay for "My Dinner with André". He has translated and adapted "The Threepenny Opera", "The Master Builder" and "The Mandrake".

Probing essays and observations by acclaimed actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, in his first nonfiction collection.

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.

Contents

Introduction....................9
ONE The Quest for Superiority....................19
TWO After the Destruction of the World Trade Center....................29
THREE "Morality"....................33
FOUR An "American" Publishes a Magazine....................49
FIVE Patriotism....................53
SIX Interview with Noam Chomsky....................55
SEVEN Bush Proposes Preemptive War....................69
EIGHT The Invasion of Iraq Is Moments Away....................73
NINE Up to Our Necks in War....................83
TEN Israel Attacks Gaza....................93
ELEVEN Myself and How I Got in to the Theatre....................99
TWELVE Reading Plays....................115
THIRTEEN Aesthetic Preferences....................119
FOURTEEN Interview with Mark Strand....................127
FIFTEEN Writing about Sex....................153