The Illumination - Hardcover

Kevin Brockmeier

3.4

3,562 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224093371 ISBN 13: 9780224093378

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2011

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At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely. I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you. The six recipients-a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor-inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it:

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Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2011: When wounds and illnesses, both superficial and severe, begin emitting a beautiful shimmering light--a phenomenon quickly coined "The Illumination"--a chain of characters learn to adapt to this unexpected change in Kevin Brockmeier's incandescent novel, The Illumination. No longer able hide their own pains from the world, and suddenly exposed to the discomfiting wounds of strangers, friends, and lovers, these characters struggle to adapt to a new way of experiencing life and, in very different ways, to understand the intrinsic connection between love and pain. "There was an ache inside people that seemed so wonderful sometimes," one character muses. And then, because this ache is also corporeal, "He wished he had brought his camera with him." While Brockmeier's brilliant novel is innately tied up in pain and loss, witnessing the lives he creates in the midst of this new wonder is not only a beautiful experience but, yes, an illuminating one. --Lynette Mong

About the Author:

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia; the children's novels City of Names and Grooves- A Kind of Mystery; and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. In addition to The New Yorker, he has published in The New York Times, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the O. Henry- Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He's the 2009 guest editor for the anthology series Best American Fantasy 3 and was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. Brockmeier lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

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