Skip to main content
Illuminations: Stories

Illuminations: Stories

Current price: $19.99
Publication Date: October 10th, 2023
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN:
9781639732074
Pages:
464
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore-one of the most influential writers in the history of comics-"a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving" (Neil Gaiman) which takes us to the fantastical underside of reality.

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.

About the Author

Alan Moore is an English writer widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics. His seminal works include From Hell, Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. He is also the author of the bestselling Jerusalem. He was born in Northampton, and has lived there ever since.

Praise for Illuminations: Stories

“Mr. Moore's writing is as brilliant as ever-from dizzying wordplay in scene-setting detail to cuttingly succinct summaries . . . As for the stories themselves, there is no shortage of wild invention . . . Fans of Mr. Moore in all his incarnations will love this collection.” —Wall Street Journal

“Burn[s] with Moore's soaring intelligence and riotous humanity . . . Illuminations, Moore's first collection of short fiction, finds the writer working on a smaller scale but still swinging for the firmament . . . the book showcases all of Moore's strengths as a fantasist . . . Moore has written both a dynamite story collection and a dynamite monster manual . . . Moore's failures are few, his radiances many . . . Remarkable.” —Junot Diaz, The New York Times Book Review

Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and moving . . . Both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters . . . [It] refuses to leave your head after you've read it.” —Neil Gaiman, author of AMERICAN GODS and NORSE MYTHOLOGY