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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.

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various uncharted parts of existence.

In "A Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel of fantastical specialists fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry's major players over the last seventy-five years, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business.

From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that--a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Hypothetical Lizard - [Liavek] - novelette (variant of A Hypothetical Lizard 1987)
• 47 - Not Even Legend - short story
• 63 - Location, Location, Location - novelette
• 99 - Cold Reading - short story
• 117 - The Improbably Complex High-Energy State - (2022) - novelette
• 155 - Illuminations - short story
• 173 - What We Can Know About Thunderman - novel
• 415 - American Light: An Appreciation - novelette
• 441 - And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence - short story

Rosa Mandolini knows in her heart that her family are the greatest painters of magical illuminations in the city. But the eccentric Studio Mandolini has fallen on hard times and the future is no longer certain.

While trying to help her family, Rosa discovers a strange magical box protected by a painted crow. But when she finds a way to open the box, she accidentally releases the Scarling, a vicious monster determined to destroy the Mandolini family at any cost.

With the aid of her former best friend and a painted crow named Payne, it's up to Rosa to stop the Scarling before it unmakes the magical paintings that keep the city running, and hopefully save her family in the process!

Created in 2006 as a spinoff of Doctor Who, the internationally popular BBC television series Torchwoodis a unique blend of science fiction and fantasy, with much more of an adult flavor than its progenitor. The series' "omnisexual" protagonist, maverick 51st-century time agent Captain Jack Harkness, leads a team of operatives from the present-day Torchwood Institute, a secret organization dedicated to battling supernatural and extraterrestrial criminals. With its archetypal characters, adult language, subversive humor and openly homosexual and bisexual storylines, Torchwood provides a wealth of material for scholarly analysis and debate.

Using Torchwood as its focal point, this timely collection of essays by a range of experts and enthusiasts provides an interpretive framework for understanding the continually developing forms and genres of contemporary television drama.

One fateful evening in a suitably dark, beer-soaked Swiss rathskeller, a wild and obscure Irishman named James Joyce would become the drinking partner of an unknown physics professor called Albert Einstein. And on that same momentous night, Sir John Babcock, a terror-stricken young Englishman, would rush through the tavern door bringing a mystery that only the two most brilliant minds of the century could solve... or perhaps bringing only a figment of his imagination born of the paranoia of our times.

An outrageous, raunchy ride through the twists and turns of mind and space, Masks of the Illuminati runs amok with all our fondest conspiracy theories to show us the truth behind the laughter... and the laughter in the truth.

Even in a land of eternal twilight, secrets can't stay in the dark forever.

Seventeen-year-old Eyelet Elsworth has only one hope left: finding her late father's most prized invention, the Illuminator. It's been missing since the day of the mysterious flash--a day that saw the sun wiped out forever over England.

But living in darkness is nothing new to Eyelet. She's hidden her secret affliction all of her life--a life that would be in danger if superstitious townspeople ever guessed the truth. And after her mother is accused and executed for a crime that she didn't commit, the now-orphaned Eyelet has no choice but to track down the machine that was created with the sole purpose of being her cure.

Alone and on the run, she finally discovers the Illuminator--only to see a young man hauling it off. Determined to follow the thief and recover the machine, she ventures into the deepest, darkest, most dangerous part of her twisted world.

Revised edition: This edition of Lumière includes editorial revisions.

With Urlick imprisoned for the murder of Professor Smrt, Eyelet must find her way back through the Infirm-infested woods, to the forbidden city of Brethren, to free Urlick before it's too late. Along the way, she elicits the help of Crazy Legs, Urlick's longtime friend. Together they overthrow a travelling freak show train destined for Brethren, with plans to use it to distract the city, so Urlick can make an escape. But Eyelet is lead astray, when a haunting image from her past appears in an abandoned factory at the edge of town. There she unearths a series of ungodly secrets and soon finds herself, imprisoned. Will C.L. be able to save them both from their fates? Or will he too, fall prey to the tyranny of Brethren's newest Ruler? Rumor has it the Ruler has secrets of her own. Secrets she's determined to keep. Seems an heir may have been overlooked. The true heir to the Commonwealth throne.