STEVEN MILLHAUSER's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, was published in 1972 and several years later received the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. Since then he has published nine works of fiction, among them several collections of stories and novellas, as well as the novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He is also a recipient of the Lannan Award and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," from The Barnum Museum, was the basis of the film The Illusionist (2006), starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. Millhauser's work has been translated into fourteen languages. He is a Professor of English at Skidmore College, and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
“Remarkable.... Not just brilliant but prescient.” —The New
York Times Book Review
“Readers seeking the perfect introduction to Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Steven Millhauser need look no further.... Dangerous
Laughter draws on every facet of his imagination. . . . It's more
akin to music-making than storytelling." —The Seattle
Times
“Millhauser's best story collection. . . . Every reader knows of
writers who are like secrets one wants to keep yet whose books one
wants to tell the world about. Steven Millhauser is
mine.” —The Boston Globe
“Enchanting.... Steven Millhauser is a
marvel.” —Cleveland The Plain Dealer
“[An] absorbing, impeccably imagined
collection.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Beautiful and profound.... Millhauser's work is among the most
thought-provoking I've ever encountered.” —Los Angeles Times
Book Review
“Dangerous Laughter groups three sets of smart, darkly obsessive
stories around the themes of risk-taking, imaginary places, and
ersatz biographies, all led off by a crazy cartoon cat-and-mouse
slapstick drama rendered with pure cloak-and-dagger
delight.” —Elle
“Tales fueled by curiosity and wonder, from a master ... [who] is
consistently so much fun to read ... Everything one has come to
want and expect in Millhauser’s fiction is here–spooky attics,
fantastic inventions, artists driven mad, and ambitious enterprises
that become overattenuated and impossible to sustain. The result is
almost a Steven Millhauser primer, a much needed fix for fans ...
and a perfect introduction for those unacquainted with his
writing.... [‘A Precursor to the Cinema’ and ‘The Wizard of West
Orange’ are] marvelous stories that make the suspension of
disbelief feel like no work whatsoever ... Millhauser has done
nothing here to diminish his reputation as one of our most dazzling
storytellers. ‘It was said that no matter how closely you examined
one of the Master’s little pieces, you always discovered some
further wonder,’ he writes of his obsessive court miniaturist [in
‘In the Reign of Harad IV’]. The same could be said of Steven
Millhauser.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Reviewers use words like enchantment recklessly, as though it
happens to us all the time. Book reviewers are especially prone to
describing books as ‘enchanting,’ pretending that a spell has
actually been cast over us. If only it were so. As often as not, it
is a spell of boredom. Steven Millhauser’s books are the exception.
. . .
[‘Cat ‘n’ Mouse’] sounds like a ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon as written
by Franz Kafka. Or Sigmund Freud.... [It is] indelibly vivid ...
hard-edged and bright as a plasma screen ... In ‘The Disappearance
of Elaine Coleman,’ a young woman disappears from inside her
apartment without a trace.... Millhauser turns an ordinary whodunit
into a tale of obscure people who slowly disappear out of apparent
volition.... There is no more poignant note in Millhauser than
this: the sense of life that has come to nothing, as we understand
that Elaine Coleman has committed a metaphysical form of suicide:
willing herself out of existence because in the eyes of others she
has already been erased. In the most haunted story of them all,
‘The Room in the Attic,’ Millhauser introduces us to a high school
boy whose friend’s sister, Isabel, lives in an attic shut off
completely from light.... There are few writers in America better
at striking the note of longing, of missed opportunity, of life
taking uncanny and unfathomable turns. The utter weirdness of the
young man in a pitch black room, held rapt and immobile by the lure
of an unseen and teasing young woman is the very essence of
estrangement itself. Millhauser is the maestro of the creepy. In
reading [Dangerous Laughter] the reader experiences what Millhauser
himself must feel as he writes these Kafkaesque stories of real
mystery in imaginary suburbs.” —The Buffalo News
“A sense of mystery and strangeness pervades these 13 stories . . .
Millhauser’s intelligence and originality shine through on every
page. Recommended.” —Library Journal
“Exhilarating ... [Millhauser] has taken strange, magical
ideas and crystallized stories around them.... He takes
abstractions and fleshes them out, without ever losing sight of
their wonder, or of the inherent humor of human desire. He’s like
Borges, but funny. And while there aren’t really characters, in the
sense of people with feeling and motives (other than obsession),
you come to know these outlandish ideas like old friends.
Millhauser explores every nook and cranny of the strange, and shows
us what it might be like to live in a world where we pushed just a
little further–or rather, much, much further–into the realm of the
mysterious and unknown.... Dangerously
good.” —BostonNow.com
“Imaginative ... masterful. [Dangerous Laughter] opens with a
story about Tom and Jerry—that’s right, cartoon characters. But it
doesn't resort to easy pop-cultural winking at the
reader. Instead, Millhauser portrays this manic animated world
with precise, flat descriptions that are more akin to Chekhov than
Loony Tunes. It’s a risky opener, but what could have been cutesy
nostalgia turns out to be a tale of concentrated dread.... As
fantastical as each of [Millhauser’s] stories may be, they never
seem more than a notch away from reality.... Five
stars.” —Time Out New York
“Excellent.... a substantial treat. Millhauser may criticize the
pleasures of escapism in his fiction, but he provides them
himself.... He takes the institutions of fun–parks, pleasure domes,
fun houses–as his subject matter, [and] describes just what it
feels like to enter these magic kingdoms ... capturing the
very feeling of childhood innocence. The title story imagines
laughter that is literally dangerous—a teen cult of extreme,
hour-long laughter grips a suburban community for one summer–and
thereby brings the idea of danger back to the point where fantasy
takes control. That moment of release guides almost all of his
plots. It is true that one character, a previously quiet girl who
becomes queen of the uninhibited laugh, actually dies. But the
sense of danger upon which the story balances is that of midsummer
restlessness—of initiation. The danger is, in a word, sweet ... ‘In
the Reign of Harad IV’ deserves special mention: It concerns a man
of ambition who is not a master builder, but an artist. He has been
working for years on a miniature version of King Harad’s palace,
but his taste for the nearly invisible leads him to create objects
so deliciously tiny that they actually are invisible–and thus his
fame and fortune ends.” —The New York Sun
“Entrancing ... Millhauser’s stories of obsession and paranoia
explore the bewitching, undefined space between perception and
reality, evoking a disquieting supernatural realm that threatens to
disrupt the everyday.” —The Washington Post
“There is a ferocious restlessness in Steven Millhauser’s stories,
a mingling of desire and dread. Among the showpieces in his
mesmerizing new collection, Dangerous Laughter: ‘Cat ’n’ Mouse,’
which amazingly puts into words the familiar cartoon to bare the
existential angst behind the familiar slapstick, and ‘A Change in
Fashion,’ a tale of sartorial design gone mad that makes the
emperor’s new clothes look uninspired.” —O, The Oprah
Magazine
“Excellent ... beautiful. Millhauser is a writer of high degree,
and he definitely knows his way around a sentence.... My favorite
of the thirteen [stories] is “The Room in the Attic,” a story of a
high school boy who visits a mysterious girl in a pitch black
room.... It’s a riveting read, and the conclusion took me by
surprise. It’s not difficult to recommend Dangerous Laughter ... If
you’re looking for a quick read [with] substance, give it a
shot.” —Static Multimedia
“Fantastical fashions, pastimes, and pursuits consume whole
communities, only to disappoint them (or worse) in Millhauser’s
newest collection of stories. Dresses balloon to the size of houses
(and women slip out from under them unnoticed). A Babel-like tower
finally reaches heaven, only to lose its mystique. Best, there is
the pseudoerotic game in which friends stimulate each other to
paroxysms of laughter ... This is classic Millhauser, and it won’t
disappoint newcomers or longtime fans.” —Slate
“Only Millhauser could pull off a story modeled after a Tom and
Jerry—like cat-and-mouse cartoon; no one else is as attuned to the
poetry hidden under pop detritus, or as capable of bringing it to
light.... 13 deadpan fantasies featuring alternate histories,
otherworldly architecture, and teenagers at (deadly)
play.” —Details
“A collection of gossamer yet substantial entertainments from the
ineffably graceful stylist well on his way to becoming America’s
Borges (or, perhaps, Cortázar). If that seems paradoxical, so does
Millhauser, who has spent decades perfecting a minimalist art that
nevertheless encompasses the history of our culture, its
predecessors and its oppressors.... Marvels within marvels, from a
writer whose prose possesses the equivalent of what musicians call
perfect pitch.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[A] gem ... comes from Mr. Millhauser with ‘The Room in the
Attic.’ In this haunting tale [from his collection Dangerous
Laughter, due in February], a teenager befriends a classmate’s
sister, who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown and remains
sequestered in a darkened attic room.... The two teenagers engage
in innocent games in the dark that slowly evolve into electric
scenes of tender foreplay. [Millhauser] conjures a convincingly
dreamlike world, highly charged with desire and suspense, yet the
characters barely touch or see one another.... Masterly
storytelling.” —The New York Times
“Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of the
virtues of Millhauser’s new collection, which focuses on the misery
wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition.... Millhauser’s
stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending his peculiar
domain further than ever.” —Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“Millhauser is one of our most inventive writers.... The curious
opening story in his new collection, which sets the stage for
further hilarious and creative delights in stories to come, is
titled ‘Cat ’n’ Mouse,’ which puts into narrative form a typical
cartoon struggle between two archenemies, à la Tom and Jerry ...
Demonstrating equal ingenuity is the three-part ‘Room in the
Attic,’ an enigmatic, surreal piece about a boy’s obsession with
his friend’s sister; the fairy-tale like parable ‘In the Reign of
Harad IV,’ and the sly social satire, ‘Here at the Historical
Society’ ... Thirteen stories are gathered here–an unlucky number?
Certainly not for the reader.” —Booklist (starred, boxed
review)
"Cat'n' Mouse," "Vanishing Acts," Impossible Architecture," "Heretical Histories": four groupings for 13 stories with a darkly comic -sensibility. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
"Remarkable.... Not just brilliant but prescient." -The New York
Times Book Review
"Readers seeking the perfect introduction to Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser need look no further....
Dangerous Laughter draws on every facet of his imagination.
. . . It's more akin to music-making than storytelling." -The
Seattle Times
"Millhauser's best story collection. . . . Every reader
knows of writers who are like secrets one wants to keep yet whose
books one wants to tell the world about. Steven Millhauser is
mine." -The Boston Globe
"Enchanting.... Steven Millhauser is a marvel." -Cleveland
The Plain Dealer
"[An] absorbing, impeccably imagined collection."
-Entertainment Weekly
"Beautiful and profound.... Millhauser's work is among the
most thought-provoking I've ever encountered." -Los Angeles
Times Book Review
"Dangerous Laughter groups three sets of smart,
darkly obsessive stories around the themes of risk-taking,
imaginary places, and ersatz biographies, all led off by a crazy
cartoon cat-and-mouse slapstick drama rendered with pure
cloak-and-dagger delight." -Elle
"Tales fueled by curiosity and wonder, from a master ...
[who] is consistently so much fun to read ... Everything one has
come to want and expect in Millhauser's fiction is here-spooky
attics, fantastic inventions, artists driven mad, and ambitious
enterprises that become overattenuated and impossible to sustain.
The result is almost a Steven Millhauser primer, a much needed fix
for fans ... and a perfect introduction for those unacquainted with
his writing.... ['A Precursor to the Cinema' and 'The Wizard of
West Orange' are] marvelous stories that make the suspension of
disbelief feel like no work whatsoever ... Millhauser has done
nothing here to diminish his reputation as one of our most dazzling
storytellers. 'It was said that no matter how closely you examined
one of the Master's little pieces, you always discovered some
further wonder,' he writes of his obsessive court miniaturist [in
'In the Reign of Harad IV']. The same could be said of Steven
Millhauser." -The Washington Post Book World
"Reviewers use words like enchantment recklessly, as though
it happens to us all the time. Book reviewers are especially prone
to describing books as 'enchanting,' pretending that a spell has
actually been cast over us. If only it were so. As often as not, it
is a spell of boredom. Steven Millhauser's books are the exception.
. . .
['Cat 'n' Mouse'] sounds like a 'Tom and Jerry' cartoon as written
by Franz Kafka. Or Sigmund Freud.... [It is] indelibly vivid ...
hard-edged and bright as a plasma screen ... In 'The Disappearance
of Elaine Coleman,' a young woman disappears from inside her
apartment without a trace.... Millhauser turns an ordinary whodunit
into a tale of obscure people who slowly disappear out of apparent
volition.... There is no more poignant note in Millhauser than
this: the sense of life that has come to nothing, as we understand
that Elaine Coleman has committed a metaphysical form of suicide:
willing herself out of existence because in the eyes of others she
has already been erased. In the most haunted story of them all,
'The Room in the Attic,' Millhauser introduces us to a high school
boy whose friend's sister, Isabel, lives in an attic shut off
completely from light.... There are few writers in America better
at striking the note of longing, of missed opportunity, of life
taking uncanny and unfathomable turns. The utter weirdness of the
young man in a pitch black room, held rapt and immobile by the lure
of an unseen and teasing young woman is the very essence of
estrangement itself. Millhauser is the maestro of the creepy. In
reading [Dangerous Laughter] the reader experiences what
Millhauser himself must feel as he writes these Kafkaesque stories
of real mystery in imaginary suburbs." -The Buffalo News
"A sense of mystery and strangeness pervades these 13
stories . . . Millhauser's intelligence and originality shine
through on every page. Recommended." -Library Journal
"Exhilarating ... [Millhauser] has taken strange, magical
ideas and crystallized stories around them.... He takes
abstractions and fleshes them out, without ever losing sight of
their wonder, or of the inherent humor of human desire. He's like
Borges, but funny. And while there aren't really characters, in the
sense of people with feeling and motives (other than obsession),
you come to know these outlandish ideas like old friends.
Millhauser explores every nook and cranny of the strange, and shows
us what it might be like to live in a world where we pushed just a
little further-or rather, much, much further-into the realm of the
mysterious and unknown.... Dangerously good." -BostonNow.com
"Imaginative ... masterful. [Dangerous Laughter]
opens with a story about Tom and Jerry-that's right, cartoon
characters. But it doesn't resort to easy pop-cultural winking at
the reader. Instead, Millhauser portrays this manic animated world
with precise, flat descriptions that are more akin to Chekhov than
Loony Tunes. It's a risky opener, but what could have been cutesy
nostalgia turns out to be a tale of concentrated dread.... As
fantastical as each of [Millhauser's] stories may be, they never
seem more than a notch away from reality.... Five stars." -Time
Out New York
"Excellent.... a substantial treat. Millhauser may
criticize the pleasures of escapism in his fiction, but he provides
them himself.... He takes the institutions of fun-parks, pleasure
domes, fun houses-as his subject matter, [and] describes just what
it feels like to enter these magic kingdoms ... capturing the very
feeling of childhood innocence. The title story imagines laughter
that is literally dangerous-a teen cult of extreme, hour-long
laughter grips a suburban community for one summer-and thereby
brings the idea of danger back to the point where fantasy takes
control. That moment of release guides almost all of his plots. It
is true that one character, a previously quiet girl who becomes
queen of the uninhibited laugh, actually dies. But the sense of
danger upon which the story balances is that of midsummer
restlessness-of initiation. The danger is, in a word, sweet ... 'In
the Reign of Harad IV' deserves special mention: It concerns a man
of ambition who is not a master builder, but an artist. He has been
working for years on a miniature version of King Harad's palace,
but his taste for the nearly invisible leads him to create objects
so deliciously tiny that they actually are invisible-and thus his
fame and fortune ends." -The New York Sun
"Entrancing ... Millhauser's stories of obsession and
paranoia explore the bewitching, undefined space between perception
and reality, evoking a disquieting supernatural realm that
threatens to disrupt the everyday." -The Washington Post
"There is a ferocious restlessness in Steven Millhauser's
stories, a mingling of desire and dread. Among the showpieces in
his mesmerizing new collection, Dangerous Laughter: 'Cat 'n'
Mouse,' which amazingly puts into words the familiar cartoon to
bare the existential angst behind the familiar slapstick, and 'A
Change in Fashion,' a tale of sartorial design gone mad that makes
the emperor's new clothes look uninspired." -O, The Oprah
Magazine
"Excellent ... beautiful. Millhauser is a writer of high
degree, and he definitely knows his way around a sentence.... My
favorite of the thirteen [stories] is "The Room in the Attic," a
story of a high school boy who visits a mysterious girl in a pitch
black room.... It's a riveting read, and the conclusion took me by
surprise. It's not difficult to recommend Dangerous Laughter
... If you're looking for a quick read [with] substance, give it a
shot." -Static Multimedia
"Fantastical fashions, pastimes, and pursuits consume whole
communities, only to disappoint them (or worse) in Millhauser's
newest collection of stories. Dresses balloon to the size of houses
(and women slip out from under them unnoticed). A Babel-like tower
finally reaches heaven, only to lose its mystique. Best, there is
the pseudoerotic game in which friends stimulate each other to
paroxysms of laughter ... This is classic Millhauser, and it won't
disappoint newcomers or longtime fans." -Slate
"Only Millhauser could pull off a story modeled after a
Tom and Jerry-like cat-and-mouse cartoon; no one else is as
attuned to the poetry hidden under pop detritus, or as capable of
bringing it to light.... 13 deadpan fantasies featuring alternate
histories, otherworldly architecture, and teenagers at (deadly)
play." -Details
"A collection of gossamer yet substantial entertainments
from the ineffably graceful stylist well on his way to becoming
America's Borges (or, perhaps, Cortazar). If that seems
paradoxical, so does Millhauser, who has spent decades perfecting a
minimalist art that nevertheless encompasses the history of our
culture, its predecessors and its oppressors.... Marvels within
marvels, from a writer whose prose possesses the equivalent of what
musicians call perfect pitch." -Kirkus Reviews
"[A] gem ... comes from Mr. Millhauser with 'The Room in
the Attic.' In this haunting tale [from his collection Dangerous
Laughter, due in February], a teenager befriends a classmate's
sister, who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown and remains
sequestered in a darkened attic room.... The two teenagers engage
in innocent games in the dark that slowly evolve into electric
scenes of tender foreplay. [Millhauser] conjures a convincingly
dreamlike world, highly charged with desire and suspense, yet the
characters barely touch or see one another.... Masterly
storytelling." -The New York Times
"Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of
the virtues of Millhauser's new collection, which focuses on the
misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition....
Millhauser's stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending
his peculiar domain further than ever." -Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"Millhauser is one of our most inventive writers.... The curious
opening story in his new collection, which sets the stage for
further hilarious and creative delights in stories to come, is
titled 'Cat 'n' Mouse,' which puts into narrative form a typical
cartoon struggle between two archenemies, a la Tom and Jerry ...
Demonstrating equal ingenuity is the three-part 'Room in the
Attic,' an enigmatic, surreal piece about a boy's obsession with
his friend's sister; the fairy-tale like parable 'In the Reign of
Harad IV,' and the sly social satire, 'Here at the Historical
Society' ... Thirteen stories are gathered here-an unlucky number?
Certainly not for the reader." -Booklist (starred, boxed
review)
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