Posted in: Books, Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, illuminations

Alan Moore Short Story Collection Illuminations Gets 150,000 Print Run

In April last year, Bleeding Cool got the scoop on Alan Moore's new publishing plans, a collection of short stories called Illuminations and the beginnings of a five novel series called Long London. At the time we wrote;

Illuminations, his collection of short stories, is to be published in September 2022.

The first-ever short story collection from the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, a beguiling series of tales on the revealing power of magic and imagination. Illuminations is an astonishing, rich and broad collection of short stories, each featuring some kind of illumination or realization. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Alan Moore's Illuminations is a series of beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

And later adding the full description.

From the unparalleled imagination of New York Times bestseller Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and other modern classics, nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, which take us to the fantastical underside of reality. In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, 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 for sorcerers 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 over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and 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.

We now know that the Illuminations: Stories by Alan Moore will have a print run 150,000 copies. So there should be plenty to go around, at least initially. At gteh recent US Book Show he noted that he made no claim to be prescient but, one story, set on the "advent of the apocalypse in the town of North Bedford," was written a year before the pandemic actually emptied the streets across England. "I've always loved the short story form. I think it's the best form for any writer to start and presumably end their career in."

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