American Literature
2 total works
"The Barnum Museum" is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus side-show masquerading as a collection of short stories. In the title story, the Barnum Museum is a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it. Other stories include: the tale of a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman - and loses her to an imaginary man, and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured. Ingeniously written and orchestrated, each exhibit in "The Barnum Museum" will compel you to continue, each story becoming a lure to the next.
The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from "August Eschenburg, " the story of the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supercedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay, " a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.