Product Description

From the bestselling author of Martin Dressler comes a new collection of short stories that explore the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them.

With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #520841 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-22
• Released on: 1999-02-22
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.97" h x .59" w x 5.22" l, .51 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out."

From Library Journal
Millhauser, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Martin Dressler (LJ 4/15/96), shows his boundless imagination in this collection of surreal, fanciful, and dark-edged stories. Breaking the rules of short-story writing, half of the selections lack a central character and are instead narrated by a nameless "we." Though this may distance the reader, it gives insight into group consciousness, something rarely expressed so directly in fiction. We are also treated to Millhauser's elaborate descriptions of awe-inspiring, otherworldly amusement parks, department stores, and underground passageways. Even his more conventional stories give us flying carpets, duels, and two-foot frogs, and for this reason the book is perhaps best read in small doses, lest Millhauser's descriptions become overwhelming. Unique and always fascinating; essential for academic and larger public libraries.AChristine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Twelve mesmerizing tales about the subterranean forces of artistic creation, and about the eruption of the uncanny into quotidian life, by one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive modern American writers. Millhauser, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler (1998), typically works a narrow but deep terrain, focusing on such things as the allure of various kinds of underworld, the lives of obsessed artists, the shimmering mysteries of the natural world. All are present in this new collection. The title story examines what happens when a performer possessing almost supernatural skill in his craft feels driven by his own need to excel and by the desires of his audiencesto transgress, using his knives to explore the boundary between art and life, with fatal consequences. Art, Millhauser reminds us, is necessary (the knife thrower's audiences crave his performances), but also necessarily dangerous. ``Paradise Park'' offers another version of the creator an transgressor, represented by the astonishing efforts of a designer of a turn-of-the-century amusement park on Coney Island to outdo his rivals, culminating in the creation of a vast underground park more like purgatory than paradise, challenging its audiences ideas about what art and technology should do. Several of the tales here, including ``Flying Carpets,'' ``The Sisterhood of Night,'' and ``Clair de Lune,'' issue from Millhauser's fascination with the special receptivity that children and adolescents demonstrate for the mysterious potentials of life, for sensing the sheer strangeness behind the everyday. ``Balloon Flight, 1870'' mingles metaphysics with the traditional elements of an adventure tale, and ``A Visit'' offers an ironic reworking of an old folklore motif, involving the marriage of a man and an animal. Enchanting, often disturbing tales, written in a prose of deceptive simplicity, providing further evidence that Millhauser is a fabulist of rare power. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.