Barnum Museum: Stories - Hardcover

His true strength is magic realism. . . . Brilliant parodies, pastiches, and comments on Alice in Wonderland, Sinbad, and T. S. Eliot show how this gifted craftsman can stretch the boundaries of the form.

Millhauser has pursued and perfected a narrative mode that comes out of the European romantic tradition by way of Edgar Allan Poe. . . . His stylized elegance is reminiscent of Borges and Nabokov. . . . His stories are paeans to the imagination, their magic stemming from the human mind's zest for creating marvels. . . . Graced with a powerful sense of humor.

A writer who vivifies the act of reading. . . Like Borges (and Italo Calvino), he takes us inside the labyrinth of prose.

The sentences are of Cartesian clarity. . . . Irresistible. . . . Think of these stories as literary fairy tales, lost characters from The Arabian Nights, the further ghost stories of an antiquary, the slightly etiolated blooms of a late Romantic imagination. Steven Millhauser is, all in all, a wonderfully appropriate writer for our very own fin de siecle.

His best, most resonant stories, like those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, remind us that good works of fiction are, among other things, fables. . . . Some of Millhauser's stories bring to mind the somber ironies of Kafka and Borges, but in general his imagination has a light, serene quality the quality of a precocious child's delight in his own ingenuity. . . . Purely enchanting.

Imagine a funhouse gallery for fictive techniques and ideas, and you'll have some sense of these stories. . . . Invites comparison with the work of Robertson Davies. . . . A distinctive mix of stylistic dazzle and erudite wonder.

Staggering. . . . With his doppelgangers and children's games, thaumaturgical hauntings and junkshop catalogues, Steven Millhauser may well be American literature's last Romantic, its sole remaining wanderer through the troubled borderland between mundane reality and the world of art.

Stunningly clever and thought-provoking . . . Millhauser is a brilliant stylist who can shift voices like a good ventriloquist.

What a pleasure it is to read a writer this good Millhauser seems sometimes to return us to the original sources of art, the awe and wonder before the untrustworthy but beautiful force of existence. . . . I love this writer and this book. --Peter Straub

"Steven Millhauser's stories are as dense with minute realistic detail as a 15th-century Flemish painting, but they never fail to take a sharp turn into fantasy. Imagination is his favorite subject as well as his precision instrument. His fiction is about virtuosity, especially his own. But it's also about the way imagination takes possession of the world and the imaginer." -- Entertainment Weekly

A mesmeric collection of stories from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author