Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky

"Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking." TONI MORRISON

"Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle." PANKAJ MISHRA

SLEEPING AMONG SHEEP UNDER A STARRY SKY is a collection of essays written over the course of the last thirty-five years.

Shawn seems to start from the premise that the world ought to be a place where all of us can lie around on cushions writing letters and love poems to each other on multi-coloured paper, as perhaps the women and men of the eleventh-century Heian court in Japan were able to do. Why do we not inhabit a world in which beauty, sensuality, and the adoration of other people, other beings, and the natural world are our principal preoccupations? Why, instead, are we obsessed with a joyless struggle for supremacy over each other? Why have we invented races and nations? Is what we call "civilization" the precipitating cause of our destructiveness and viciousness, our sadism, our love of murder? Shawn himself grew up as a child of privilege and has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits and hedonism. Has the life he's led provided him with any sort of valuable vantage point from which to view the world, or has he simply been a parasite? As he himself feels that the answer isn't clear, a certain self-questioning underlies these essays, along with a nagging doubt about whether we're right to insist that all of our different qualities and aspects cohere into a single "self." If the self is simply an illusion, how can we understand "ourselves"? And if we don't understand ourselves, what conclusions should we draw from that?



Wallace Shawn is an American playwright, actor, and essayist.



"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."



"Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle, Wallace Shawn represents, in our opinion-addled age, a vanishing ideal of the cosmopolitan sensibility. These wide-ranging essays are irresistible in their unique mix of compassion and acuity, moral passion and indifference to dogma."



“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.”



“Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative.”



“Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking.”



“WS’s manner is conversational but informed. He has a powerful sense, both as an actor and political essayist, of the extent to which our better selves are constrained by lines that have been written for us; by received ideas, the comforting deceptions of class, agency and so on. Behind most of these essays are questions about the unfairness of life to which the author responds -- fairly, I think -- without answers, only further questions of his own.”