'Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking.' - Toni Morrison
'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
Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky is a collection of essays written over the course of the last thirty-five years.
Born in 1943 in New York, Shawn has been writing plays since 1967. He has also worked as an actor. As he says of himself, he can be seen as someone who has spent his life 'sunk deep in the not particularly grown-up world of pretending and make-believe, but one could also note that writing plays and acting both involve the close observation of human society and human behaviour'. In a way entirely unique to himself, Shawn here attempts to understand the social and political realities of his time, whilst also offering some of his thoughts about 'the relatively innocent and provincial activity of creating small imaginary worlds with made-up characters'.
His ultimate goal in the book is to determine whether people who are by nature self-indulgent, people who are intimately concerned with the pursuit of the beautiful, the pursuit of the aesthetically pleasing, can play a role in fighting against the horrifying injustice and vicious destructiveness that characterize our world.
'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
