Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky - Essays 1985-2021

-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