The Knife Thrower: and Other Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

9780679781639: The Knife Thrower: and Other Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
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Included in this short story collection is "The Sisterhood of the Night", now a major motion picture. From the bestselling author of Martin Dressler, this volume explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them.
 
With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges.

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Review:
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé 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."
From the Inside Flap:
or his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser has always been most at home with the short story. This new collection of twelve stories puts his rich and varied talents on dazzling display, demonstrating why this singular writer is acclaimed as one of the most subtle, magical, and penetrating explorers of the American imagination.

Whether chronicling the phastasmagoric excesses of an amusement park entrepreneur in "Paradise Park," or the dangerously addictive delights of the largest department store ever conceived in "The Dream of the Consortium," Millhauser's fictions explore not only the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, but also the darker, subterranean desires that fuel them. From the odd corners of life that persist below the sunlit world in "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town," to views from the heavens in "Flying Carpets" and "Balloon Flight, 1870,&qu

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  • PublisherVintage
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0679781633
  • ISBN 13 9780679781639
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages240
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780609600702: The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780609600702
Publisher: Crown, 1998
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  • 9781861591364: The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dresslera collection of stories in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges that explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them. "Tantalizing new stories. Millhauser's ingenuity is delicious." A. S. Byatt, The Washington Post Book WorldWith the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author presents a collection of tantalizing stories "as Gothic as Poe and as imaginative as "Fantasia"" ("Entertainment Weekly"). Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679781639

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