Praise for Night Thoughts

“With impeccable logic, [Shawn] gently, but lethally, skewers the complacency of the lucky while highlighting the plight of the less fortunate, including the Muslims living in the slums of European cities, the maid of a wealthy friend, and a boy at a dance who shoots someone flirting with his girlfriend.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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Praise for Essays

“Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought-provoking.”

—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

“It’s short and easy to read but incredibly thought-provoking and novel in its own subtle, idiosyncratic way.”

—Glenn Greenwald

“Wallace Shawn’s essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.”

—Michael Moore

“From a low-earning playwright’s troubles to reflections on why the Palestinians are justified in their resentment of Israel. Wallace Shawn: Fearless!”

—GQ, Best Books of 2009

“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 [Shawn] speak his curious mind.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“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 indispensable, 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 André (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, he’s very funny.”

—Tony Kushner

“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