Follows twelve-year-old Kevin Brockmeier over the course of a single school year as he sets out in search of himself: losing old friends and gaining new ones, happening into his first kiss, writing plays and stories, dressing as Dolly Parton for Halloween, booby-trapping his lunch to deter a thief. He explores the dream of his own past, recovering the person he used to be, the friends he had, the doubts he hid, the secrets he kept, the books he read and everything that was once his life.
"A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip is 1) a truly stunning hybrid - a memoir told with the imaginative vibrancy and the uncanny precision of the best fiction; 2) a coming-of-age story that feels absolutely universal, even as Mr. Brockmeier's retrospective eye is grass-blade-precise about his own particulars; 3) hilarious; 4) devastating; 5) awesome-beyond-all-adjectives. If you are already a Kevin
Karen Russell, bestselling author of Swamplandia!
"In A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, Brockmeier - surely one of our great writers - has captured perfectly that hinge-creak, aching moment in adolescence when you are alive to everything, but comprehend very little of it - when the joy of figuring out who and what you are collides with the dawning of shame and embarrassment and self-consciousness. When there is a lot of feeling, but very little
Ethan Rutherford, author of The Peripatetic Coffin
