Obie Winner Wallace Shawn Releases First Nonfiction Collection 9/1, Signing Appearances Announced

From the Actor and Obie Award-Winning Playwright Toni Morrison Says is "Lovely, Hilarious, and Seriously Thought-Provoking" comes "Essays By Wallace Shawn"

With a Bold and broad-ranging set of essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey through high art, war, culture, politics, and privilege. With his distinctive humor and insight, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand and change it.

"I've written plays and a few screenplays, in each one of which a person who isn't me speaks, and then another person who isn't me replies, and then a third one enters or the first one speaks again, and so it goes until the end of the piece. I've even worked as a professional actor, speaking out loud as if I were someone not myself.

Every once in a while, though, I like to take a break from fantasy land, and I go off to the place called Reality for a brief vacation. It's happened a dozen or so times in the course of my life. I've looked at the world from my own point of view, and I've written these essays. I've written essays about reality, the world, and I've even written a few essays about the dream-world of ‘art' in which I normally dwell. In a bold mood I've brooded once or twice on the question, Where do the dreams go, and what do they do, in the world of the real?" --From Essays by Wallace Shawn

In Essays, Shawn takes up such subjects as:
* writing about sex--as featured recently in Harpers
* the relationship between art and politics
* the strange world of Manhattan's cultural elite* the genesis of his plays
* and much more.

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 and Aunt Dan and Lemon, among other works.

AUTHOR EVENTS
Sept. 1: Barnes and Noble-Lincoln Triangle, New York, NY
Oct. 7: MacNally Jackson, New York, NY
Oct. 14: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Oct. 15: City Arts and Lectures, San Francisco, CA
Oct. 17: New Yorker Festival, New York, NY

ESSAYS
By Wallace Shawn
Publication date: September 1, 2009
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Format: Trade Cloth
Page count: 175
Retail Price: $18.95 (USA) / $18.95 (Canada)
ISBN: 978-1-60846-002-1
Category: Politics / Essays

"Essays" will be released simultaneously in unabridged audiobook format, read by Shawn. Compact Disk, $36 / ISBN: 978-1-60846-004-5

Photo credit Carlos Gustavo Monroy