The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World

An ethereal meditation on longing, loss, and time in a present that is rapidly fading, from the acclaimed author of Shame and Wonder. David Searcy's writing is enchanting and peculiar, obsessed with plumbing the mysteries and wonders of our everyday world, the beauty and cruelty of time, and nothing less than what he calls "the whole idea of meaning." With "casual virtuosity" (The New York Times) and an insatiable sense of awe, "Searcy finds the strange and marvelous in careful examination of the quotidian" (NPR). In The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World, he leads the reader across the landscapes of his extraordinary mind, moving from the slightly faded architectural wonder that is the town of Arcosanti, Arizona, to the open Texas highway in his much-abused college VW Beetle, to the mysterious, canal-riddled Martian landscape that famed astronomer Percival Lowell first saw through his telescope in 1894. Searcy does not come at his ideas directly, but rather digresses and meditates and analyzes until some essential truth has been illuminated. It is perhaps best to let Searcy cut to the heart of this book's mission himself: "So here's a theory. We are lost. We're neither here nor there. There's you, and there's the you that knows there's you. And in that gap between the two--and we are always in that gap--we're migratory. Back and forth, always crossing and arriving. Somehow never quite arrived."