Steven Millhauser: the writer's writer and author of Martin Dressler and Edwin Mullhouse offers a new collection of short stories.

Despite a career spanning more than three decades and a handful of prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser remains, by choice, distant from the lavish attention paid to writer-celebrities. After all, he responds with a disarming honesty, he's a writer, not a rock star. More than other well-established writers, the intensely private Millhauser, who teaches creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, diverts attention away from himself and toward his art. "I believe books, not authors, should receive attention," he says.

Millhauser has navigated the margins of American literature quite comfortably since his debut, Edwin Mullhouse (1972), established him as a phenomenon. Since then, he has published three novels, nearly a dozen novellas, and dozens of short stories. His well-received new short story collection Dangerous Laughter should garner even more praise for his art. The stories, like his previous fiction, reflect his obsession with verbal alchemy, the limits of invention, the blurring of reality and dark fantasy, the enchanting, and the just plain weird--and showcase his evolving vision as a sure-footed master of the craft.

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Although Millhauser has been described as a contemporary realist--think John Updike, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger--his fiction is informed by a keen historical interest, recalling that of contemporaries Don DeLillo and E. L. Doctorow. He's also popular with fans of science fiction and fantasy, despite his insistence that his work is neither. Millhauser himself highlights his modernist influences--among them Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. That's a heady mix.

With sly humor and labyrinthine complexity, Millhauser explores the extremes of physical and psychological spaces far removed from everyday life. His work contains automatons and illusionists, artists and dreamers, and disenchanted royalty and inventors on fantastic flights of fancy. His improbable worlds come to life through closely observed details.

Born in Connecticut in 1943 and educated at Columbia and Brown, Millhauser has never quite forgotten the experience of growing up in a small town in the mid-20th century. For most, this was a time of promise and peace, technological growth, the freedom of the automobile, television, and the looming perils of the cold war.

In his fiction, Millhauser diverges from his childhood experiences while recreating some of their magic and exploring the complex tension between illusion and reality. His work often mixes the fantastic--how the eponymous magician in his short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" erodes the moral fabric of fin de siecle Prague with his sleight of hand, or whether the passionate clockmaker's son in the novella "August Eschenburg" (1986) can transcend the boundaries of automaton art--with grounded stories that resonate with childhood memories. They recall languid days as a boy, the enchanting nights, and the all-too-eventual encroachment of time and reality that creates the bittersweet nostalgia in so much of Millhauser's work.

THE TOUR DE FORCE

Edwin Mullhouse

The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972)

* PRIX MEDICIS ETRANGER (BEST NOVEL BY A FOREIGNER)

Few debut American novels of the late 20th century received as much acclaim as Edwin Mullhouse, an intricate parody of literary biography, a study of childhood, an abbreviated Bildungsroman, and a serious contemplation on the artistic impulse--all told through the eyes of a child. Millhauser penned the novel in his late 20s, while a graduate student at Brown University.

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THE STORY: The novel, an exploration of friendship and betrayal, spans the life of the precocious Edwin Mull-house. It starts at the beginning--even as the baby Edwin is brought home from the hospital and his friend, the six-month-old Jeffrey Cartwright, improbably observes the spectacle--and progresses to his death 11 years later, as Edwin puts the finishing touches on his novel Cartoons, an unquestioned work of genius. "Biography is so simple. All you do is put in everything," Edwin muses to Jeffrey on one of his many philosophical tangents.

"[Millhauser displays] an enviable amount of craft, the harsh discipline that carves through the scar-tissue of personality painfully developed during a process known as 'growing-up.' ... Steven Millhauser has written a rare and carefully evoked novel." WILLIAM HJORTSBERG, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 9/17/72

"Millhauser seems to have forgotten nothing of the way children go about the business of being children, at once succored by the adult world and stymied by its elephantine misreading of what children need and want." PEARL K. BELL, NEW LEADER, 10/16/72

THE ART OF SHORT FICTION

In the Penny Arcade (1986)

Millhauser's first collection of short fiction set the tone for the riotous, inventive work to follow. It contains work published in the early 1980s in venues such as the New Yorker, Grand Street, Antaeus, and the Hudson Review.

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THE STORIES: In the Penny Arcade consists of a novella and two sections each of three stories. All seven narratives examine familiar themes: the movement from innocence to experience, the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, and definitions of art. Especially engaging: the novella "August Eschenburg," the fragmented "Cathay," "A Protest Against the Sun," "The Sledding Party," and "A Day in the Country," stories of suburban realism.

"Mr. Millhauser possesses a bountiful imagination, and an ability to catch his perception in a bright butterfly net of prose, and those gifts lend these stories a lovely afterlife, colorful and lively, in the reader's mind." MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES, 1/11/86

"Millhauser's Vermeerian gift for the tableau-vivant rendering of detail is given full reign in the odd and beautiful 'Cathay,' less a story than a catalog of wonders from a mysterious kingdom dedicated to the creation of complex miniatures--to precision and order." DAVID LEAVITT, ESQUIRE, FEBRUARY 1986

THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

Martin Dressler

The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996)

* PULITZER PRIZE; NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

After a career as a writer's writer, Millhauser earned the Pulitzer for a novel that captures the entrepreneurial spirit and excess of the Gilded Age. Martin Dressler reflects many of the author's Big Ideas and brings to life an America on the cusp of a brave new age.

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THE STORY: Starting as a cigar boy, Martin Dressler, the son of an immigrant, goes to work as a bellboy in a Manhattan hotel. He works his way up and, after a few wild successes, starts to imagine bigger and better things--including a hotel empire fitting of a city bursting at the seams with energy and progress. As his aspirations grow, however, he becomes haunted by a mad ambition that knows no bounds. As reality gives way to fantasy, Martin, who epitomizes the emptiness of the American dream, begins to lose sight of the things that really matter in life.

"On the first page, Millhauser announces that this is to be an American fairy tale, one steeped in the mythology of American success and offering, at its end, a cautionary moral. That Millhauser then proceeds to deliver as advertised is no mean accomplishment." JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST 4/28/96

"[Martin Dressler] coolly explores this American Dream in all its manifestations as aim, vision, intention, nightmare, hallucination, delusion, death. the great city--and by extension America, with its ever more exotic immigrants, its ever more hyperbolic advertising, its voracious ambition, its headlong rush into the 20th century--becomes 'a fever patient in a hospital, thrashing in its sleep, erupting in modern dreams.'" JANET BURROWAY, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 5/12/96

HIS LATEST WORK

****

Dangerous Laughter

13 Stories

By Steven Millhauser

New and eclectic stories from a master.

Dangerous Laughter showcases Millhauser's quirky talents, as he delivers these 13 gems through his off-center version of reality. Divided into three parts--"Vanishing Acts," in which people disappear (or slowly grow dimmer); "Impossible Architectures," which offers near-future scenarios; and "Heretical Histories," about bridges to the inanimate world--and with the stand-alone introductory "Cat 'n' Mouse," these stories run the gamut from the mundane to the fantastic. They explore various topics--from culture (the lives of cartoon characters in "Cat 'n' Mouse") and space ("In the Reign of Harad IV," "The Dome," and others) to the limits of history and invention ("Here at the Historical Society," "A Precursor of the Cinema"). "A book," claims one of his characters, "is a dream-machine." And so are these stories.

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Knopf. 244 pages. $24. ISBN: 0307267563

Boston Globe *****

"Dangerous Laughter is Steven 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." DAVID ROLLOW

New York Times Book Review *****

"The 13 terrific stories in Dangerous Laughter reintroduce us to this strange realm, last glimpsed five years ago in Millhauser's previous collection, The King in the Tree. ... Millhauser's chronicles of our semi-inhabited landscape seem not just brilliant but prescient." D. T. MAX

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ****