β Scribed by Steven Millhauser
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like FabergΓ© 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."
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.
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