From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between.The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exa...

'A prodigy of imagination, insight and overwhelming tenderness' Independent'Remember me when I'm gone' just took on a whole new meaning . . .Laura Byrd is in trouble. Three weeks ago she and her friends found themselves alone in one of the coldest, most remote places on earth. Her friends set out in search of help, and now Laura realises that they are not coming back. So she gathers her remaining supplies and sets out on an extraordinary journey.

Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers.A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch an...

Peering into the often unnoticed corners of life,KevinBrockmeier has been consistently praised for the originality of his vision, the boundlessness of his imagination and the command of his craft. Once again, in this new collection of fiction, Brockmeier shows us a fantastical world that is intimately familiar but somehow distant and beautiful. From the touching title story, where a young, antisocial woman imagines her escape into the sky with an apparition only she can see, to the hauntin...

At age twelve, Kevin Brockmeier is ready to become a different person: not the boy he has always been—the one who cries too easily and laughs too easily, who lives in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes—but someone else altogether.Over the course of one school year—seventh grade—he sets out in search of himself. Along the way, he happens into his first kiss at a church party, struggles to understand why his old friends tease him at the lunch table, become...

By turns funny, moving, romantic and surreal, and filled with unexpected twists and turns, each of the tales on this lineup has a magical element.Andrew Lam's "The Palmist", performed by James Naughton. A chance encounter on a bus between a fortune-teller and a teenage boy.W. W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw", performed by John Lithgow. A wonderful ghost story about a trinket with terrible powers.Saki's "The Occasional Garden", performed by Daniel Gerroll. If ...

Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers. “Ghosts and Speculation,” an excerpt from Kevin Brockmeier’s extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories, The Ghost Variations, discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what...

Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeier’s richly imagined Things That Fall from the Sky views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens.In the deftly told “These Hands,” a man named Lewis recounts his time babysitting a young girl and his inconsolable sense of loss after she is wrenched away. In “Apples,” a boy comes to terms with the complex world of adults, his first pangs of love, a...

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 i...

"Weird [and] wonderful" stories by a Strega Prize winner with "shades of Fellini, shades of Dickens, shades of the great Italian horror director Mario Bava" ( Los Angeles Times).From "The Epidemic," which traces the gradual effects of a "state influenza" that targets those who disagree with the government, to "The Collapse of the Baliverna," in which a man puzzles over whether a misstep on his part caused the collapse of a building, to "Seven Floors," which...

While playing alone in her backyard one afternoon, seven-year-old Celia suddenly disappears while her father Christopher is inside giving a tour of their historic house and her mother Janet is at an orchestra rehearsal.Utterly shattered, Christopher, a writer of fantasy and science fiction, withdraws from everyone around him, especially his wife, losing himself in his writing by conjuring up worlds where Celia still exists—as a child, as a teenager, as a young single mother—and rev...

Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers.A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch an...