From the Pulitzer Prize — winning author hailed by The New Yorker as “a virtuoso of waking dreams” comes a dazzling new collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession. In Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser...
Cartoons that draw their creator into another world; demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to...
Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters-one a dreamlike shadow, the other...
Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at 10, is mysteriously dead at 11. As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises...
As explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, 'Man's Fate' ('La Condition Humaine'), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to...
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her — or almost exactly like her — and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is...
In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka’s Galchen’s American Innovations, a young woman’s furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned...
A sweeping, compelling story which brings to life the Iranian Revolution, from an author who experienced it first-hand.
In the house of the mosque, the family of Aqa Jaan has lived for eight centuries. Now it is occupied by three...
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the deaf-mute illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman, traveled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription-an order of the first...
Germany’s master of wit and irony now for the first time in English.
Hinrich takes his existence at face value. His wife, on the other hand, has always been more interested in the after-life. Or so it seemed. When she dies of a stroke,...