Illuminations

Iconic comics writer Alan Moore's first short story collection, Illuminations, and a five-book fantasy series, Long London, were acquired by Bloomsbury in a hotly-contested auction.A previous winner of the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, Alan Moore is hugely respected and admired in the publishing world and beyond, with likes of Neil Gaiman, Damon Lindelof and Joss Whedon all naming Alan as a major influence.Living legend with amazing sales: The author of the acclaimed, bestselling graphic novels, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Batman: The Killing Joke, and most famously Watchmen, which has sold over 2 million copies (and almost 150,000 copies in the last two years alone), Alan Moore has a truly devoted following which will pick up anything he writes.A category Bloomsbury knows how to succeed with: Susanna Clarke, Samantha Shannon, and other writers of fantasy are among the most successful on our fiction list, and Alan Moore is the perfect addition to it. We are partnering with Bloomsbury US on Illuminations and his forthcoming fantasy series, so it will receive a huge global push on both sides of the Atlantic.Speculative short stories sell better than other categories of short stories: Ted Chiang, Neil Gaiman, NK Jemisin, Susanna Clarke - all of their story collections have performed extremely well, and we can have more confidence publishing a collection in this genre than a more purely literary one.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 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He is also the author of the bestselling Jerusalem. He was born in Northampton, and has lived there ever since.'A wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving ... Both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality' NEIL GAIMAN 'One of the great fiction minds of his generation' ROLLING STONE In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, international bestselling author and legendary creator of From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other modern classics, Alan Moore, presents nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, each taking us deeper into the fantastical underside of reality. In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for 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 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 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. 'One of the most significant fiction writers in English ... Moore's influence can be felt everywhere - in our literature, on our screens, in our politics' GUARDIANFrom the unparalleled imagination of international bestseller Alan Moore, author of From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other modern classics, nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, which take us to the fantastical underside of reality.'Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving. A few are stories I've loved for years (in one case, for decades), some were new to me, often managing to be both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. It's Alan Moore's Guernica, a time-hopping ontological Imaginary Story that refuses to leave your head after you've read it'One of the great fiction minds of his generationThe king of comicsMoore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal neverendingHis bighearted passion for his people ... and the whole monstrous endeavour of the human condition is infectious. I'm not sure there's a God, but I thank Her for Alan MooreOne of the most significant fiction writers in English ... Moore's influence can be felt everywhere-in our literature, on our screens, in our politics