"Writing Wrongs is an eloquent book, giving an important and neglected playwright his due. Wallace Shawn is almost alone among contemporary American playwrights: His work is morally engaged without being sanctimonious, political without being didactic, graphic without being vulgar. He confronts us with our hypocrisies, glib opinions, and blind habits, then encourages us to face unanswerable questions—about ethics, religion, sex, and privilege. Many of Shawn's characters are marvelously fluent, but the most theatrical moments of his plays are silent and halting—when a besieged character cannot rely on his or her usual way of thinking and must devise a new, more personal response to the world. "W.D. King is sensitive to all of these aspects of Shawn's theatre. In what is the only book-length study of Shaw, King places him in the context of his culture and provides lucid interpretations of the major plays and films. King is a confident writer, beckoning the reader to follow along as he makes provocative connections between, say, My Dinner with André and Sartre; The Fever and Euripides; Aunt Dan and Lemon and Freud, O'Neill, and Shoah. The range of reference always brings the reader back to the texts with a refreshed and buzzing mind."
—Marc Robinson, Yale School of Drama