The Illumination - Hardcover

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

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.