Shame and Wonder Essays [Hardcover]

USDavid Searcyis the author ofOrdinary HorrorandLast Things,and the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Dallas, Texas.“Astonishment is a quality central to David Searcy’sShame and Wonder. . . . What unites these twenty-one essays . . . is the sense of a wildly querying intelligence suspended in a state of awe. . . . Searcy is drawn instinctively to moments, the way parcels of time expand and contract in memory, conjuring from ordinary experience a hidden sense of all that is extraordinary in the world, in being alive. . . . The novel served [Virginia] Woolf the way the essay does Searcy: as a mode within which to . . . give form to the formless, to make deeply felt and dramatic the place of each well-apprehended moment.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A lovely implicit argument for a particular orientation toward the world: continuous awe and wonder . . . Everywhere, David Searcy finds the strange and marvelous in careful examination of the quotidian.”—NPR
 
“Peculiar and lively . . . Like a down-home Roland Barthes, [Searcy’s] quirky observations and sudden narrative turns remind us of the strangeness we miss every day.”—MinneapolisStar Tribune
 
“Often nostalgic and whimsical . . . [Shame and Wonder] brings to life the shadows of our kaleidoscopic world.”—The Dallas Morning News

“[Searcy] finds meaning in baseball gloves, prizes in cereal boxes, TV shows from his childhood, the story of a Jewish acrobat with a wooden leg who fell to his death while trying to walk a tightrope while carrying an iron stove on his back, an old tree carved with hearts and lovers’ initials whose growth seems to have mirrored the chronology of the lives and loves of the carvers, and the study of l#&