Like dispatches from another world, the twenty-one essays in David Searcy's debut collection Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound and haunting. In his late sixties, the Texan author David Searcy became drawn to non-fiction, writing 'straight-up', on note pad and manual typewriter, a series of disparate thoughts and interests. These unframed apprehensions, as he called them - of forgotten baseball fields, childhood dreams of space travel, the bedtime stories he'd invent for his young children - evolved into a sequence of extraordinary essays probing the pivots and pathways of his life, and puzzling out what they might mean. Expansive in scope, but deeply personal in their perspective, the pieces in Shame and Wonder forge beautiful connections that make the everyday seem almost extraterrestrial, creating intricate and glittering constellations of words and ideas. Radiant and strange and suffused with longing, this collection is a work of true grace, wisdom and joy.
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