The View From the Seventh Layer

The View From the Seventh Layer
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-03-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307387763

Peering into the often unnoticed corners of life, Kevin Brockmeier 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 haunting story of a pastor tempted by something less than divine, Brockmeier moves effortlessly from the extraordinary to the everyday, while challenging us to see the world anew. Stunning, elegant, profound, and playful, The View from the Seventh Layer cements Kevin Brockmeier's place as one of the most creative and compassionate writers of his generation.

The Ghost Variations

The Ghost Variations
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1524748838

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 anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead: these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.

The Brief History of the Dead

The Brief History of the Dead
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2006-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375424237

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 exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

Things that Fall from the Sky

Things that Fall from the Sky
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307429725

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, and the bizarre death of his Bible coach. “The Jesus Stories” examines a people trying to accelerate the Second Coming by telling the story of Christ in every possible way. And in the O. Henry Award winning “The Ceiling,” a man’s marriage begins to disintegrate after the sky starts slowly descending. Achingly beautiful and deceptively simple, Things That Fall from the Sky defies gravity as one of the most original story collections seen in recent years.

The Illumination

The Illumination
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2011-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1446468585

Something strange is going on. All over the world, pain is manifesting itself as light. Cuts and bruises blaze and flash. Arthritic joints glow. Injured troops emit radiant white shards into the desert night. On the news, they're calling it 'The Illumination'. As this breathtaking phenomenon takes holds, a private journal of love notes passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, a lonely hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other people. Each of them will find their lives changed forever over a story which spans decades and continents, a story that shines a spectacular light on the wounds we all bear...

The Truth About Celia

The Truth About Celia
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307429474

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 revealing in his stories not only his own point of view but also those of Janet, the policeman in charge of the case, and the townspeople affected by the tragedy, ultimately culminating in a portrait of a small town changed forever. The Truth About Celia is a profound meditation on grief and loss and how we carry on in its aftermath.

The View from Flyover Country

The View from Flyover Country
Author: Sarah Kendzior
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250189993

Collection of essays originally written between 2012 and 2014.

The Seventh Sense

The Seventh Sense
Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2016-05-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0316285048

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER Winner of the getAbstract 17th International Book Award "The Seventh Sense is a concept every businessman, diplomat, or student should aspire to master--a powerful idea, backed by stories and figures that will be impossible to forget." -- Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? What if you could understand why? The Seventh Sense is the story of what all of today's successful figures see and feel: the forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples. The secret to power now is understanding our new age of networks. Not merely the Internet, but also webs of trade, finance, and even DNA. Based on his years of advising generals, CEOs, and politicians, Ramo takes us into the opaque heart of our world's rapidly connected systems and teaches us what the losers are not yet seeing--and what the victors of this age already know.

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307908992

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, becomes the talk of the entire school thanks to his Halloween costume, and booby-traps his lunch to deter a thief. With the same deep feeling and oddly dreamlike precision that are the hallmarks of his fiction, the acclaimed novelist now explores the dream of his own past and recovers the person he used to be.