Shame and Wonder

Strange, wonderful, and full of curiosity and nostalgia, David Searcy’s essays chip away at the world around us to lay bare the beauty and sadness at the heart of it all.

Gay Talese

Shame and Wonder is a work of genius. A very particular kind of genius, to be sure, one that bides more comfortably with questions, potentialities, mysteries and wonders than with the hard and fast answers that the information age has taught us to crave. How rare these days to commit oneself to uncertainty, but when it's done as David Searcy does it – gently, insistently, ever alert to all shades of slapstick and tragic – the inquiry itself becomes the revelation, an object lesson in what it means to be human. If you want to know things, real things, read Shame and Wonder. It will knock you flat and lift you up.

Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

David Searcy reminds us what voice means and why it’s useful. We can hear something here, something achieved and distinctive. A writer has figured out how to bring the style of his prose into near-perfect alignment with his habit of mind, and to trust the impulses of his curiosity, in such a way that we seem to experience not effort but flowing thought.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

Reading David Searcy isn’t like reading anyone else. Following the path of his thoughts is endlessly surprising. I will keep thinking about the inquisitive intelligence of this book for the rest of my life.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

Astonishing. The fact that Searcy is an idiosyncratic writer can be seen by the first page of any one of his essays, the fact that he’s a great writer by the last.

Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman

Hangdog dejection and unlikely epiphanies infuse these offbeat, beguiling essays. Searcy’s writing is by sharp turns goofy, wry, and melancholy, tentative at times but always curious and superbly evocative. His essays meander along wisps of metaphorical connection, leaping from tooth-flossing to 17th-century housing, from Zuni religious rituals to cereal box prizes, from his mother’s stilllife painting to medieval Platonism. The result is a funny, haunting journey through mysterious enlightenments.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The essays in this debut collection… suggest what might happen if Stephen King somehow morphed into David Foster Wallace… Meaning and mystery coexist in Searcy's mind, and his offbeat, exciting writing will resonate with readers for whom "you never know" and "who knew?" might be mantras.

Kirkus (starred review)

From his home range in Texas, David Searcy undertakes a skewed examination of the human condition – by searching for the answers to questions that no-one else has quite thought to ask. Shame and Wonder is quirky, hugely original, sometimes funny and sometimes profound, and yes, it is a book filled with wonders.

Neil Ansell, author of Deep Country and Deer Island

With these subtle, irreverent, meditative essays David Searcy takes the reader on a leisurely tour through the labyrinth of his fascinations, unspooling a golden thread of astonishment as he goes. Sometimes wistful, always surprising, he looks without flinching on both the shame and the wonder inherent in being human.

Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica and Adventures in Human Being

A sharp and profoundly wise book.

The Herald

As the title suggests, Shame And Wonder is a bittersweet book, but also a sharp and profoundly wise one.

Western Mail

Brilliant... if you hang on, you'll be rewarded with the kind of unexpected insights that a mere pointy delta writer could never hope to achieve.

Roger Cox, The Scotsman

The book’s best passages are its simplest. A chapter called 'Love in Space' contains lucid memories of what it was like to be seven during the race to the moon, when 'the call to space rang clear across the land'. As with Dyer and also Karl Ove Knausgaard – whom Searcy resembles in his confessional style – the ability to re-inhabit the childhood self gives freshness to adult observations. Writing and paintings and films, Searcy is succinct and insightful.

Times Literary Supplement