✍ Scribed by Steven Millhauser
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
“[We Others] is all the things a person wants a Steven Millhauser book to be: lapidary, disturbing, mandarin, brilliant, perverse, and funny. As befits a book whose very title is given in the collective first person, it contains a teeming multitude of strange voices. There's not a dog in the bunch. A new-and-selected-stories collection is an invitation to look at a writer's career, and Millhauser's has been a long, strange trip. It's not his biography that's been weird, but his work—and weird in the old-fashioned sense. Millhauser has refused pure realism from the start, but he's not a formal gamesman like Donald Barthelme. His narrative structures are usually old-fashioned. It's what he does with them that's surprising. He uses comfortable story, novella, and novel forms to take us into the realms of the fantastic and the absurd. For many writers this would be—has been—enough. But Millhauser goes a further step. As strange as his characters' experiences may be—watching a friend fall in love with a giant frog; telling us what it's like to live as a ghost; flying around the backyard on a carpet—he always delivers us eventually to felt human experience. He uses these odd situations to try to get at subtle, hard to pin down, and very real human feelings. . . . Millhauser also specializes in stories that try to get below the surface of ordinary life. He probes hard at tiny moments—such as a character's anticipatory approach to the first summer dip in the lake in the story "Getting Closer." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Millhauser is a master of the purely fantastical—stories that feel witty and contemporary but also make gemlike little fairy tales. His astounding novella collection, The King in the Tree , falls into this category. Millhauser shows in this work that he can write with a hard, glittering beauty. But he is probably most famous for his rarified and unusual historical fiction. He repeatedly explores the technologies and art forms that were new in the 19th century, wondering and worrying over the birth of the modern. This obsession—a word I think it is fair to use—informed his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler(1996). . . . A longtime master of the short form, Millhauser shows in [the seven] new pieces that he has somehow managed to improve what was already very good, writing with increased clarity, power, and emotional heft. The opening story, ‘The Slap,’ is told from the collective point of view of the townspeople of a smug commuter town where an unknown assailant has taken to slapping random victims. The story manages to indict elite complacency without slipping into sophomoric American Beauty -type clichés. The slaps force the townspeople to reassess their comfortable lives . . . Millhauser makes us sympathize with the outsider, the slapper, through the words of his victims. This displacement of sympathy is typical of his stories; you as a reader often find yourself on the wrong end of the stick, or, if not the wrong end exactly, then at least the poky, awkward one. . . . The book is full of gorgeous writing about seriously entertaining characters. . . . There's something moving about the idea of this man, now growing older, returning over and over to these ideas, reworking his most fruitful ground. It takes a kind of stamina to explore the meaning of things so relentlessly, and a kind of humility to admit you haven't pinned it down entirely. We Others begins to show us how these obsessions have spanned Millhauser's lifetime, much the way his characters' obsessions span their own lifetimes. It's like watching a man live out his fate, a favorite Millhauser word.”
—Claire Dederer, Slate
“Millhauser still wears the distinction of ‘short-story master’ around his neck like an albatross keeping him out of the spotlight. With the arrival of his newest collection, the career-spanner We Others , it’s clear that while he might prefer novels, short stories remain his most accessible and influential work. Of the seven new works, the lead story, ‘The Slap,’ most deserves a place among Millhauser’s best. . . . Millhauser draws out the growing fear as both rational and irrational . . . The structure alternates between close third-person narration in the heads of the slap victims and first-person plural that encapsulates the fears and thoughts of the entire community. It’s simple but deft, and executed with pinpoint accuracy to hypocritical suburban fear. . . . [Millhauser’s] fierce imagination comes with a dark temperament instead of positive humor.”
—Kevin McFarland, _The A.V. Club
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“Fantastic and enchanting. . . Millhauser is a master. His novels and stories are often preoccupied with oddities: circuses and carnivals, sideshows, nickelodeons, weird museums, twisted suburban landscapes and their denizens, eccentrics, illusionists, magicians, and builders of automata, zoetropes and other animating and esoteric technologies. His stories take the reader down paths that become increasingly, subtly, bizarre. Yet even as things turn stranger and stranger still, the reader finds herself propelled compulsively on the grace of Millhauser’s prose. We Others is a collection of 21 of Millhauser’s short stories spanning more than 30 years. The first seven are new; the remaining 14 are selected from past collections that helped establish Millhauser's reputation as a first-rate fabulist. . . . Millhauser explores an astonishing range of themes, spanning the limits of desire and the imagination, the role of the spectator and the responsibility of the artist, the individual in society and the centrality of stories in our lives. Some of his stories are about the art of artifice, about how far an artist can or should go to keep an audience's attention: How far is too far? At what point does the artist transgress? . . . These collected stories are by turns haunting, hilarious, absurd (in the best way), enigmatic and wondrous. Gems dominate. . . . These stories will seize your attention—and your imagination—with the force of a vise grip.”
_—Patrick Lohier, The Globe and Mail
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“Many of the [twenty-one] stories collected [in We Others] walk the line between absurdism and realism to dizzying effect. . . . .Millhauser’s chops are indisputable, having won a Pulitzer for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. And both the new stories and the old prove that he’s one of the most inventive writers working today, constantly pulling apart and reassembling his stories until they don’t resemble anyone else’s.”
—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
“The bizarre and the disturbing—magicians, inventors, mad watchmakers, ghosts, and aliens—populate Pulitzer Prize–winning author Steven Millhauser’s new collection. These tales teem with wild and original ideas, some incidental, some central to the plot, but all hinting that any apparent narrative simplicity should not be taken at face value. The titular story, ‘We Others,’ plunges into a world of darkness and despair . . . The story is a nightmare of absent endings set in a twilit limbo. . . . Vivid.”
—Eve Ottenberg, Washington City Paper
“For almost 40 years, Steven Millhauser has been creating fables of identity, exploring how an irruption of the magical or inexplicable can unexpectedly transform a life or an entire society. In a loose sense, he is a writer of literary fantasies, belonging to that fabulist line that runs from the “Arabian Nights” stories through the unsettling tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann on to the magic-realist masterpieces of Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino. His work illustrates the very definition of the uncanny—that moment when the homey or familiar suddenly swerves into something rich, strange and menacing. . . . Like his illustrious antecedents (and such near contemporaries as Russell Hoban, Angela Carter, John Crowley and Michael Chabon), Millhauser calmly mixes fairy tale and literary experiment, surreal nightmare and ecstatic vision, gorgeous prose and sly humor. But he also adds a profound Americanness. . . . Millhauser owns the smell of fresh tar on streets, the creak of gliders on wooden porches, the rivalries of the playground and all those rainy Saturday afternoons playing Clue and reading comic books. Most impressively, though, he skirts the real danger of sentimentality through an iron control of tone: Millhauser’s voice on the page is cool, reserved, profoundly courteous. Unusually, he often employs the first-person plural, drawing his readers into a shared dream or nightmare. . . . Illusion and reality, the power of the imagination, the nature of storytelling, childhood wonders, romantic yearning, a taste for the erotic and slightly perverse—these themes recur throughout . . . Some of us could no more stop breathing than stop reading him. . . . Steven Millhauser possesses the wand of an enchanter. In his books the wonders never cease.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Two centuries ago, a German physician named Franz Anton Mesmer became so adept at hypnotizing his patients that his name formed the root of a verb: mesmerize. We should likewise consider making a new word to describe the unnerving effect Steven Millhauser's short fiction has on readers. His stories lure us into dark places with promises of magic and wonder, and we're unable to look away—much less flee—as the stories take a subtle turn and we see strange, even terrifying things moving toward us. This must be how a small animal feels as it waits, hypnotized, for the predator's pounce: In a word, we have been millhauserized. Millhauser's new collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories , offers 21 stories drawn from the past three decades. Among them is some of the b...
“Every reader knows of writers who are like secrets one wants to keep, and whose books one wants to tell the world about. Millhauser is mine.”
—David Rollow, _Boston Sunday Globe
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author: the essential stories across three decades that showcase his indomitable imagination.
Steven Millhauser’s fiction has consistently, and to dazzling effect, dissolved the boundaries between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, the past and the future, darkness and light, love and lust. The stories gathered here unfurl in settings as disparate as nineteenth-century Vienna, a contemporary Connecticut town, the corridors of a monstrous museum, and Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and they are inhabited by a wide-ranging cast of characters, including a knife thrower and teenage boys, ghosts and a cartoon cat and mouse. But all of the stories are united in their unfailing power to surprise and enchant. From the earliest to the stunning, previously unpublished novella-length title story—in which a man who is dead, but not quite gone, reaches out to two lonely women—Millhauser in this magnificent collection carves out ever more deeply his wondrous place in the American literary canon.
From the Hardcover edition.
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