Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Martin The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser has always been most at home with the short story. This new collection of twelve stories puts his rich and varied talents on dazzling display, demonstrating why this singular writer is acclaimed as one of the most subtle, magical, and penetrating explorers of the American imagination. Whether chronicling the phastasmagoric excesses of an amusement park entrepreneur in "Paradise Park," or the dangerously addictive delights of the largest department store ever conceived in "The Dream of the Consortium," Millhauser's fictions explore not only the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, but also the darker, subterranean desires that fuel them. From the odd corners of life that persist below the sunlit world in "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town," to views from the heavens in "Flying Carpets" and "Balloon Flight, 1870," he takes us on a tour beyond the everyday, to realms we recognize only in dreams. In "The Way Out," an illicit affair leads an exhausted lover into a sunrise appointment with death. In "Claire de Lune" and "The Sisterhood of Night," he magically evokes the enigmatic otherness of the adolescent soul. Like the knife thrower in the title story, Millhauser's fictions beguile and beckon us into hitherto unexplored realms, where spectral truths, enchanting vistas, and the mysteries of art await us.
Author
Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life. Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986. Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (published in "The Barnum Museum"), based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006). Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, "in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets." Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008". Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.
