David Searcy's most recent collection of essays published by Random House, January 2016.  One included essay, Nameless, tells about Searcy's experience in Corsicana alongside the late Texas artist Doug MacWithey who once owned the 100 West building, and surfacing downtown lore about a nineteenth century traveling rope walker who fell to his death, headstone inscribed simply "Rope Walker."

In his late sixties, the Texan author David Searcy became drawn to non-fiction, writing 'straight-up' on notepad and typewriter a series of disparate thoughts and interests.  These unframed apprehensions, as he called them - of forgotten baseball fields, boyhood dreams of space travel, the bedtime stories invented 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. (printed on inside book cover leaf)

David Searcy lives in Dallas and Corsicana, Texas.  His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, Granta and The Best American Essays, among other publications.

240 Pages, Hardback

Random House Publishing Group