I'm flabbergasted that this book is out of print. This is truly a sad and great and wonderful book with hauntingly beautiful images. I wonder if parents and librarians were put off by its tragic tone. I'm 31 now. I read it when I was 13 or 14 and I remember it like a fever dream--the juggling doll, the boys' twin-like relationship, their games of cards, the gun. It made me feel as if the wind was blowing through my chest. I hope someone realizes how great this book is and puts it back in print.

Previous reviewers are right to single out Millhauser's stunningly accurate, beautifully rendered descriptions of the minutiae of childhood--he remembers everything of childhood we've forgotten.

More importantly, in his own playful and deadly way, he draws readers into a sinister dance, making us accomplices to the crime at the heart of the book. Among other things, if you're a reader of "real" biographies, you'll likely return to your nonfiction with a slightly different take on the genre.

Not that the following statement will win the books zillions of new readers, but, if you love (or at least admire) Nabokov's Pale Fire, be sure not to miss Edwin Mullhouse.

Much of the "stuff" of the novel has been skillfully described in previous reviews here, so, briefly, let me add that since reading this hauntingly mysterious book, I have been gorging myself on other works of the author. "Martin Dressler", and now, "The Knife Thrower and other Stories". And, I don't plan to stop there. It took me some time to catch on to the darkness beneath "Edwin", and I recommend patience on the part of the new reader of Millhauser's work for the pay-off is glorious, enigmatic, enchanted, and eye-opening.

Edwin Mullhouse is the story of a young author who takes his inspiration from comic books and animated shorts, and who was tragically dead at 11 years old. (Nothing is given away here, it's said in the first paragraph.) Millhauser weaves together a tale that, while intently focused, is incredibly reflexive, to the point where the author's intent seems to be to call to attention the art of biography as much as the art of creative writing.

The ages of the characters are highly important. If they were older, Rose Dorn and all of Edwin's other obsessions would be out of place. However, we almost understand everything that Edwin goes through, while Jeffrey (the biographer and Edwin's best friend) is left to puzzle it out. Jeffrey's memory is brought into question not by himself, but by his insistance that it is infallible. And, often, it is impeccable at remembering details of early childhood, as far as we know. His intentions are honorable, but just how far can we trust him?

The other notable thing in this book is the language. Millhauser's words are vibrant, whether describing a closed down amusement park or a cartoon or the haunting of a writer. Where else can one find a line such as: "And you see, there are all these words, nothing but words, nothing but words, what are these words, and there they are, so that's what you're faced with, words, words..."

This book is magic. That's all there is to it.

And if you ever buy Harper's then you already own it - the story was first published there. I'm not a big fan of Millhauser's style (particularly exemplified in "The Mezzanine" and "Vox") - I find him to be clever but ultimately devoid of any emotional meaning. In other words, Millhauser's writing reminds me of a well-written user's manual for some home appliance.

The Knife Thrower (the story) has some interesting ideas and would, as some have pointed out, make a good episode for the Twilight Zone. Or you could go see "Girl on A Bridge" ("La Fille sur le Pont" since it is a subtitled French import) for a great version of this idea. Perhaps this is some universal archetype since the idea seems to appeal to many.

Ultimately in the realm of short stories Millhauser does not, in my opinion, rank near the top. If you enjoy his style you would probably like some of Bradbury's early work or even Ian Banks. The rest of the stories in this volume do not leave any lasting impression, much like drinking some 'lite' soft drink.

This guy writes wicked good short stories about some of the crazyiest stuff I ever heard. What if your best friend married a freakin' frog?!? He even wrote a study of the logical stages of pleasure examined from the standpoint of the chronolgical advancements of an extroidinary amusement park. Mullhauser has a delicate sense of dark humor and a remarkable voice that he sometimes incorporates to give the reader the effect that he or she is reading an attempted account of pure facts, which lend more heft to the always fantastical subject matter. I'd compare this to some of H.P. Lovecraft's early work and perhaps Ray Bradbury as well, although Millhauser is a bit more intellectual.

Steven Millhauser, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful period novel, Martin Dressler, is an author who is strikingly different from his contemporaries. The Knife Thrower is pure Millhauser and in this collection of stories he once again looks at almost everything except ordinary, earthbound, twentieth-century American life.

Even those stories that do have a mundane, contemporary setting, such as The Dream of the Consortium, also contain something of the mysterious as well. In this story, an ordinary shopping mall becomes a world of Moorish courtyards and Aztec pyramids. In The Sisterhood of the Night, a secret society of girls, not so unusual in itself, manages to encompass the mysterious when the girls slip out of their homes to indulge in nothing more than silence. In Clair de Lune, a boy finds himself at a baseball game. But this is a nocturnal baseball game, played by girls who are dressed as boys. Flying Carpets is a fascinating story that details both the joys and the problems inherent in that particular mode of travel.

At first glance, Millhauser's stories might appear to be little more than surreal melodramas, stories that definitely have virtues but stories that also cause the reader to give up in despair. This, however, is certainly not the case. Millhauser, like Kafka, draws us effortlessly into the shimmering worlds of his imagination through his poignant and expert use of detail and the elegance and beauty of his poetic prose.

In five of these twelve stories, Millhauser uses the first person plural to wonderful effect and effectively allows his narrators to speak, not only for themselves, but for their community as well.

The title story, one of the collection's best, centers around a knife thrower named Hensch and the single performance given by Hensch and his assistant which involves a series of increasingly dangerous tricks. Like the audience, we remain uncertain about what it is we really witness as the story draws to a surprising close.

Those already familiar with Millhauser's work will be reminded of his gorgeous story, Einsenheim the Illusionist which also follows the path from ordinary to extraordinary. Other stories in this fascinating collection also bear a debt to Millhauser's earlier work, most notably The New Automaton Theater which is reminiscent of Millhauser's novella, August Eschenburg. Both offer a biography of a master automaton maker. While August Eschenberg finds himself trumped by a fellow creator, the central character in The New Automaton Theater, Heinrich Graum, stops work at the height of his success and remains silent for a period of a dozen years. When Graum finally does return to the theater he finds something very surprising and disturbing has happened to his work.

Although the first person plural seems to dominate these stories, some of the most vivid and intimate are written in the first person singular. In, A Visit, the narrator goes to see an old friend in a remote town and finds that he is married, quite happily, to a very large frog. As implausible as this story sounds, it becomes quite believable, mostly due to Millhauser's extraordinary talent for visual detail.

No Way Out is the sometimes humorous story, reminiscent of South American writer Julio Cortazar, in which a man learns the dubious distinction of honor versus dishonor.

Balloon Flight, 1870 is an account of an attempt to escape occupied Paris in a balloon. The narrator is at first exhilarated by his new perspective of the world from the air, but as the balloon ascends to 10,000 feet, he begins to experience dread, instead.

Like the narrator of Balloon Flight, 1870, Millhauser is an author whose protagonists are always seeking escape, by ascending into the air or burrowing into the earth or perfecting their art, e.g., knife throwing. Sometimes these protagonists go too far, but in their struggles between the real and the surreal, art and life, they help to shed light on both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of our own daily lives as well.

Steven Millhauser's fanciful tales are a joy to read. In the tittle story, a boy enters the penny arcade alone for the first time to face his greatest fear... being outdrawn by the gunslinging cowboy. But as we grow up, do our fears get left behind?

In another story, a woman leaves for a retreat for the weekend to relax and get a little work and is confronted with another solitary woman who is broadcasting sadness. She can't seem to escape her... or herself.

The stories collected in here are about us facing our ourselves.

"In The Penny Arcade" is a collection of Steven Millhauser's earliest stories; to read them is to be transported away to a fabulous fantasy world that might have existed in the past - or to be enchanted by the hidden pleasures of our own time. This is Millhauser's gift: on the one hand he conjures such gems as "August Eschenburg" - the brilliant, troubled artist whose medium is automatons and "Cathay," where the reader is a visitor to an imaginary kingdom of despotic emperors, floating islands, and maze-like palaces. But he is also able to describe the fantastic which exists within our own seemingly mundane world. We witness the dark corners and decrepit back rooms of a penny arcade, the increasingly intricate "Snowmen" constructed by children on a winter's day, or the Kafka-inspired "A Day in the Country," where the narrator is introduced to the shocking "wife" of an estranged (deranged?) friend. There is no weak link in this collection - a rarity for most volumes of short stories - and it can only be a testament to Millhauser's imagination and skill that he is able to form a cohesive work from disparate stories. The subjects are wide-ranging, but thematically we are reminded of the wonder that still exists within our own minds, our memories, and in our back yards.

I picked up this book because I was 'enchanted' by Martin Dressler. I also read the admiring reviews in NYTBR and Washington Post Book World.

What a disappointment this number was! Ten little tales shuffled together at random. Patches of wonderful language interposed with lots of white space. This novella doesn't add up to a Twilight Zone episode, and there's not even a narrator to give you the moral of the story at the end.

You don't suppose Steven could have put this together in a hurry for a little cash, do you?

This novella tells the story of one peculiar night in a small town that is having difficulty sleeping. Of course there have been other sleepless nights in this small town, but none until this one have been enchanted.

When the people of the town cannot sleep, they wander the streets, thinking that they are alone. Little do they know that the rest of the town is experiencing the same insomnia and are also wandering through the night. A girl longs for her beau to come to her lonely window; he does. A man lusts after a manequin in a window; she comes to life. The Pied Piper leads the children through the woods with his magic flute. A girl who decides to moonbathe in the nude is followed by a lusty man and rescued in the nick of time by a guy who lives in his mother's attic. A band of young female thieves enjoy lemonade in the most unlikely of homes.

The night is so fantastical that perhaps it was just a dream. Whatever it was, it makes for an enjoyable, short read.

Summoning the surreal white light of the past winter solstice moon, and having experienced the page turn of the century in Paris, Moscow, London New York - each like fast forwards and flashbacks to the viewing eye as the day rolled toward the Pacific ending - I found I had saved Steven Millhauser's ENCHANTED NIGHT for an eerily timed moment to savour. If ever there were a collection of images to share at such a promising time this little novella is it. Millhauser has deposited tiny thoughts like interrupted dreams that are so special that momentary awakening only pleads for us to return to the dreams. With an uncanny ecomony of words, a plethora of evocative observations, and a page-turning style of staccato images, he provides just enough literary seduction to allow the reader to fold close the book after a scant 100 odd pages, darken the lamp, and luxuriate in our own moonlight the myriad trails toward conclusions that our own dreams complete. And in Milhauser's far better words....O you who wait: this is the night of the opening of the heart.

This is an extended poem, a brief novella, a parcel of dreamdust to repeatedly read, at night, alone. Or better - to share with another child of the evening.

The first of the three novellas that comprise this book, The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, is by itself worth the price of admission. Unusually direct for Millhauser, the story of an obsessed cartoonist in turn of the century New York engages the emotions as well as the intellect, creating a quietly heartbreaking family portrait while vividly depicting the joys and agonies of iconoclastic creativity.

The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon is a yet another post-modern fairy tale, but after a slow start becomes quite intriguing, let down only by an overly facile conclusion.

Catalogue of the Exhibition is a brilliant idea -- the story of an artist and his circle told in the catalogue for an exhibition of his work -- and seems perfect for Millhauser, whose love for (and skill at) describing invented painting and drawing seemingly knows no bounds, yet this novella disappoints. The "Catalogue" idea seems tacked on as the entries grow to fill pages barely about the painting at hand, and the story never quite punches through the conceit. But we do get some wonderfully spooky descriptions of Lovecraftian canvases.

Millhauser's certainly an acquired taste and not for everyone, but if you've enjoyed any of his other work this collection, particularly its fine first tale, will likely please.

I've read several of Millhauser's books, and the first (and longest) novela in this book is one of my favorite. It's about a cartoonist who begins creating animations in the 1920's. He becomes more and more obsessed... wonderful descriptions of his drawings... but his interactions with his wife and daughter are touching and very sad. This story will have a lasting effect.

Readers of the mysterious work of Steven Millhauser are sometimes themselves a mystery. Look, for example, at some readers' extremely negative reactions to his prize-winning "Martin Dressler." What accounts for this? Perhaps this is a class of readers who trail the Pulitzer Prize committees and choose their books based only on who wins. How odd and superficial. Again and again, such know-nothings find their narrowly traditional notions of what a novel is betrayed by Millhauser. Mr. Millhauser, keep it up!

Amazon led me to Millhauser's work through a winding maze of postmodernist writers, and I was pleased to have discovered him. His trademark seems to be exhaustive inspection of detail -- the detail of a puzzle piece, a dusty corner of a library, the curves of a woman yet unknown. This volume is worth reading solely for the first story, "A Game of Clue," which simultaneously describes a family conflict during a session of the classic board game, and the action of the episode of Clue itself, complete with the twisted seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard. Ultimately, Millhauser's stylistic microscopic detail grates on the brain, and it best taken in small doses. However, this author clearly takes great pains to birth his work, and students of fiction can learn from his carefully crafted approach.

It's high time someone rediscovered Steve Millhauser's short stories, because there's nothing else like them being written in the U.S. (well, except for Ron Carlson). The title story describes a museum of impossible things--a magical place full of dreams--which would be a pleasant enough subject for a story, but Millhauser also emphasizes the commercialism of the place, the boredom of the patrons, the risks the museum runs of falling apart under its own extravagance. This is fantasy with a difference. The other stories are similarly clever: fascinating premises that actually go further than you'd expect. In "Behind the Blue Curtain," a boy sneaks behind the movie screen and discovers huge actors, as big as they are in the movies, waiting to go and entertain--and when Millhauser describes how vaporous they are, he could suddenly be talking about the weakness of fantasy, or the pressures of celebrity, or the fragility of childhood imagination. He has a deft touch with metaphor--he chooses the right one and simply lets it resonate. The other stories have similar fantastic ideas: "Klassik Komix #1", which is written as a description of a comic book, frame by frame; "The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad" which interweaves three stories--Sinbad in the past, Sinbad in his dotage, and the history of the Arabian Nights; "A Game of Clue," which tells the story of four Clue players AND describes the entire game from the perspective of the pieces...I could go on, but all the stories are imaginative and rewarding, and I can't understand why no one seems to have bought the book. Granted, he can run a little long (if you want terseness, go to Ron Carlson), but if you're hungering for a warm, Calvinoesque, American counterpart to British authors like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Will Self, meet Steven Millhauser. And prepare to smile

Wow, bad news - this book is out of print and I'm the first reviewer in years! The story is a wonderful literary fantasy inspired by the works of Jorge Luis Borges.

On a hot summer afternoon the narrator turns away from the lazy day and stumbles into the realm of Morpheus, a pseudo-Elizabethan gallant with many a tale to tell and a strange realm of dreams to explore. The marvellous library is my favorite conceit! A great book for the bookish.

This is a well crafted collection that truly takes the reader on a trip. I highly recomend this book, it allows one of those rare oppertunities to experience a book that leaves lasting impressions on life.

Steven Millhauser's "Martin Dressler" may not be worthy of the hype surrounding its Pulitzer Prize winning status but it's gotten more flak than it deserves. As a novel, it's strangely one dimensional and therefore disappointing, dull even. There isn't much of a storyline to speak of - Martin simply takes on successively bigger projects until he finally overeaches himself - and the characters (including Martin) are all bloodless, cardboard-like stick characters, sleepwalking (ironically, like Caroline) through their parts. Sure, the attention paid to periodic detail is meticulous and impressive but unless you're an afficionado of late 20th century artifacts, chances are that you'll find most of it rather tedious. That's not to say Millhauser's scene setting techniques isn't beautifully executed. It is - his descriptive prose is vivid and flawless but...indulgent. There were moments when I thought the plot was about to take off for some place leftfield but sadly, such promises were never fulfilled. Even the one heart stopping episode near the end of the novel wasn't exploited for its full dramatic potential. Martin's relationship with the Vernon women could have been fascinating had it been allowed to fuel the plot, but it remained underwritten and undeveloped. There's also an eerie feeling about the nature and relationship between the two Vernon sisters that was left unexplored. However, the weaknesses we perceive in "Martin Dressler" as a novel quickly dissolve when cast in the fable genre. Fables aren't after all about real life people but about morality and ideas. Stylistically, there are tell tale signs that suggest this treatment. For instance, Millhauser's distant and omniscient perspective of his characters - Martin's self centredness, his casual lusting over the hotel maid Maria, and his weekly visits to the whores is narrated in a tone that's entirely devoid of moral judgement. The perfectly still, never changing and repetitive image of the langourous Caroline "with her hair pulled tightly back" too has a fairy tale like and slightly spooky quality about it. Readers of "Martin Dressler" are advised to approach it as a fable to avoid disappointment. Despite its weaknesses, there were moments in there which I truly enjoyed. My verdict ? Not the masterpiece to write home about. Neither is it the dud it is made out to be.

This is a fascinating tale of American success and excess. Martin's rise is exquisitely drawn--it is a classic American tale. I found myself rooting for him almost in the same way as the Vernons in the book did. That so many of us can so readily identify with such a rags-to-riches story says alot about America. Of course, as his vision grows bolder and his means to realize that vision ever larger, Dressler oversteps. Eventually, his utter confidence in his vision, and its root shallowness, betrays him.

Reading the reviews here makes me question the utility of on-line reviews. Some of the negative reviews at this site are brief and dismissive--they don't suggest a reader that's read the same book I have! If this book interests you, don't be deterred by those who just slam it with one or two lines of contempt. But be prepared for a book that will enchant you with its wonderful evocation of turn-of-the-century New York and disturb you with the utter poverty of spirit of the title character.

Oh, and I found the "enigmatic" ending was ultimately quite satisfying, even uplifting.

In Martin Dressler, Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser has created a book that deftly explores the fine line between dreaming and madness. This is the story of a cigar maker's son who grows to realize his dream: that of becoming a master builder of ever more extravagant hotels in late nineteenth-century Manhattan. In its combination of the real and the fabulous, Martin Dressler explores the dark side inherent in the entrepreneurial spirit of America.

Reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Martin Dressler is written in an old-fashioned narration, and, in keeping with the era in which the story is set, it is told to us by a storyteller rather than being dramatized in scenes and dialogue. Although this may sound (and be) boring for some readers, it is the perfect choice for Martin Dressler and gives the book an air of nostalgia and mystery, much like an old-and-faded photograph from some halcyon bygone day.

Martin Dressler, himself, is an Hortatio Alger-like figure, a virtuous young man who becomes obsessed with art and architecture. In telling the story of Martin Dressler, Millhauser paints a vivid portrait, unique in American life: that moment in time when dreamers and visionaries were allowed to blossom and reshape a city's skyline with buildings that would take the public's breath away.

It is when Martin embarks on his most ambitious project, the building of a hotel called the Grand Cosmos, that this richly evocative book becomes its most intriguing and remarkable. The Grand Cosmos is no ordinary hotel; it is a world unto itself, embodying all the joy and the tragedy that made up turn-of-the-century New York City. Even as Martin realizes his dreams, he loses them as well, something he seems to know, for "even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker's ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth."

This is a quiet, meditative book but one that is densely descriptive and filled to the brim with rich imagery. Millhauser's prose is, as always, vivid and polished to sheer perfection and is perfectly in keeping with the tone of his story.

This is a beautiful book, certainly worthy of the Pulitzer Prize and more. In it, Millhauser paints a portrait of an ambitious man who simply had the misfortune to "dream the wrong dream," and, on a larger scale he gives us a gorgeous metaphor for the creative spirit that resides inside the soul of every human being.