"Like dispatches from another world, the twenty one essays in David Searcy's blazingly original Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound, and haunting. Formerly a writer of literary horror, Searcy had essentially given up writing before he found himself drawn back--this time, to nonfiction--in his late sixties. Writing on a 1953 Olivetti typewriter in the spare Dallas studio he shares with his girlfriend, Searcy began writing, teasing out the Big Questions, from the nature of beauty and the beauty of nature, from the hidden depths of old Scrooge McDuck comics to childhood dreams of space travel. Expansive in scope but deeply personal in their perspective, his essays--in the tradition of Sebald and Benjamin--forge beautiful connections between ephemera and life, nostalgia and philosophy, history and home, to create intricate glittering constellations of words and ideas. Radiant and strange and suffused with longing, this collection is a work of true grace, wisdom, and joy"--Provided by publisher.