Items related to The Illumination: A Novel
What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?
From best-selling and award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier: a new novel of stunning artistry and imagination about the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.
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: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one’s wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.
From best-selling and award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier: a new novel of stunning artistry and imagination about the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.
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: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one’s wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.
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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 View from the Seventh Layer, The Brief History of the Dead, The Truth About Celia, Things That Fall from the Sky, and two children's novels. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, among other publications. He has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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- PublisherPantheon
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0375425314
- ISBN 13 9780375425318
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages272
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. Pantheon, NEW YORK, NY, 2011. Hardcover. Book Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. Stated First Edition, first printing with a full number line starting with "1". 8-1/2" tall, 257 numbered pages; one piece black paper binding, silver lettering on spine only, boards plain; plain ivory end pages; fore edge is not trimmed. Book is pristine: it is square, spotlessly clean, binding tight, corners and edges not bumped, spine ends intact. The interior is also pristine: it is perfectly clean and free of writing, stray marks, stains or discolorations of any sort or paper damage of any type; paper is moderately toned, very flexible and not at all brittle. Jacket is clean; no tears, folds or fading; publisher's original price of "$24.95 U.S.A." listed on the inside front flap. Condition of book and jacket consistent with not being read. No other discernible or objectionable faults on book or jacket such as marks or writing within, stains, tears, chips, or other damage that would diminish its appearance. No remainder mark, no previous owner markings or inscriptions, not price clipped, not a book club edition, not a former library book. Signed by the author in black ball point pen on title page beneath his printed name. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # BMR-2021-2-12-2
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