A quirky middle–grade novel about an enterprising seventh–grader who discovers an astonishing plea for help in the grooves of his blue jeans. 
 Dwayne Ruggles is a regular kid living in a regular town until evil entrepreneur Howard Thigpen shows up. Thigpen seems to have the ability to make people do whatever he wants, and sparks of light swirl around him wherever he goes. But the mystery doesn't stop there. Dwayne discovers that the grooves in his Thigpen–brand blue jeans and the ripples in his Thigpen–brand potato chips contain a secret message, "Please. You must help us. He's stealing the light from our eyes." It's a race against time to solve the mystery, but first Dwayne better figure out what that strange message means.
 Ages 8+

Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

Children's Books

Brockmeier, Kevin

Literature & Fiction

Katherine Tegen Books

Dwayne Ruggles is just a regular kid, living in a regular town -- or so he thinks. One day, fabulously wealthy entrepreneur Howard Thigpen comes to school, and Dwayne notices that Thigpen is surrounded by a cloud of tiny sparks that follows him wherever he goes. The strangeness doesn't stop there -- when Dwayne discovers that the ridges in his Thigpen Brand Blue Jeans and the grooves in Thigpen Brand Potato Chips are encoded with a secret message that he can hear through an old Victrola horn, he must stop Thigpen from stealing the lights in everyone's eyes. But what does that even mean?
It's a mystery, and Dwayne better figure it out fast before Howard Thigpen does too much damage. With the help of his friends Kevin Applebab and Emily Holmes, Dwayne upsets some pigs, hears voices in his fingertips, gets rid of 100 "Ghostbuster" records, and figures out a few other amazing things. Kevin Brockmeier has crafted a fast, funny novel that demonstrates the power of ingenuity and imagination.

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 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 View From the Seventh Layer (Vintage Contemporaries)

United States

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia City Paper What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination begins. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, and from there through the hands of five other people—a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor. As their stories unfold, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience. With the artistry and imagination that have become his trademark, Kevin Brockmeier reveals a world that only he could imagine, casting his gaze on the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.

The Illumination (Vintage Contemporaries)

Title: A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip( A Memoir of Seventh Grade) Binding: Hardcover Author: KevinBrockmeier Publisher: PantheonBooks

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

Parenting & Relationships

Pantheon

Unexpected humor and tenderness intertwine with loneliness and desire to create a whimsical ambience throughout the stories of Things That Fall from the Sky. In “These Hands,” a male babysitter who claims never to have read Nabokov tells of his relationship, both constraining and exalting, with the small girl in his care. “A Day in the Life of Rumpelstiltskin” is the story of the bisected left half of the famous imp who is searching for his lost sense of wholeness. In “The Ceiling,” a man’s marriage slowly collapses as a massive object appears in the sky over his small town. And “The Jesus Stories” is the tale of a people who believe they can precipitate the Second Coming by telling every imaginable story about Jesus Christ. Combining the simplicity of fairy tales with the physical and emotional detail of very adult lives, Kevin Brockmeier has found a voice unlike any other for the stories in this glittering collection.

Things That Fall from the Sky: Stories

From the award-winning author of Things That Fall from the Sky, a richly nuanced and deeply moving novel about the disappearance of a young girl, as told by her devastated father. Celia is seven years old on the day she goes missing. Her father, Christopher, is giving a tour of their historic house; her mother, Janet, is at an orchestra rehearsal. Celia is outside playing. She rides her bicycle. She throws a rubber ball against the roof. She disappears. A writer of fantasy and science fiction, Christopher finds himself drawn into a grief-induced world of wishful fantasy in which Celia still exists. Plunging into his work to help him cope with her disappearance, he writes of its effects from the points of view of the people who are still haunted by her absence: Janet, the policeman who is in charge of the case, and Christopher himself—each voice contributing to the heart-wrenching picture of a town subtly, but lastingly, changed. The Truth About Celia is a novel of remarkable understanding—an extraordinary exploration of profound loss and inconsolable grief.

The Truth About Celia: A novel

Contemporary

“Remember me when I’m gone” just took on a whole new meaning. The City is inhabited by the recently departed, who reside there only as long as they remain in the memories of the living. Among the current residents of this afterlife are Luka Sims, who prints the only newspaper in the City, with news from the other side; Coleman Kinzler, a vagrant who speaks the cautionary words of God; and Marion and Phillip Byrd, who find themselves falling in love again after decades of marriage. On Earth, Laura Byrd is trapped by extreme weather in an Antarctic research station. She’s alone and unable to contact the outside world: her radio is down and the power is failing. She’s running out of supplies as quickly as she’s running out of time. Kevin Brockmeier interweaves these two stories in a spellbinding tale of human connections across boundaries of all kinds. The Brief History of the Dead is the work of a remarkably gifted writer.

The Brief History of the Dead: A novel

Kevin Brockmeier--award -winning author of The Brief History of the Dead--has been widely praised for the richness of his imagination, the lyrical grace and playfulness of his language, and the empathic emotional complexity of his storytelling. And this dazzling collection once again affirms his place as one of the most creative and compassionate writers of his generation. In the haunting title story, a young, asocial woman remembers the oddly honest things she wrote in her high school classmates' yearbooks and contemplates her scarred life, imagining an escape with an apparition she calls the Entity. In "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth," a formerly dull and turgid pastor is touched by a spirit that turns his sermons into crowd-pleasers--that is, until he discovers his inspiration is a little less than divine. "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device" is a gorgeous homage to the classic, young readers' choose-your-own-adventure novels. But this one is for grown-ups who can navigate through imagery and dead ends, and toward a resolution that only Kevin Brockmeier could have invented. From the fantastical to the concrete, the range of this collection is breathtaking. It moves fluidly, finding beauty in the quiet, often overlooked corners of the world. By turns daring and moving, The View from the Seventh Layer is crafted with the remarkable voice and vision that have become hallmarks of Brockmeier's acclaimed fiction.

The View from the Seventh Layer

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 into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely. I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you. The six recipients—a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor—inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one’s wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.

The Illumination: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brockmeier, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brockmeier, Kevin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brockmeier, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

The View From the Seventh Layer (Vintage Contemporaries)

The Illumination (Vintage Contemporaries)

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

Things That Fall from the Sky: Stories

The Truth About Celia: A novel

The Brief History of the Dead: A novel

The View from the Seventh Layer

The Illumination: A Novel