A story all the more devastating for its moving luminosity, Luminaries is a darkly tender meditation on the difficulties of being and remaining connected to others, even after death, and the deep ambivalence a person can feel toward their own substance, their own materiality, in a world of loss. Agnes, who works at a camp for grieving children, learns how to tap her own burgeoning emptiness in an effort to connect the substantial with the insubstantial, the grieving with the absent. The story is lovely in its yearning insights, and builds, masterfully, with emotional precision, toward a stunning and resonant conclusion, beautifully evoking the eternal and aching thereness of the no-longer-there. I choose this story because it made me sleepless, as I thought about all the losses that have given my life shape, and the ones yet to come, and the acute sorrows I have never found the language to properly express. -- Kellie Wells, author of God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna
