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by Steven Millhauser (Author)
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler--hailed by The New Yorker as "a virtuoso of waking dreams"--comes a dazzling collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession.
"Remarkable ... Not just brilliant but prescient." --The New York Times Book ReviewIn Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser transports us to unknown universes that uncannily resemble our own. The collection is divided into three parts that fit seamlessly together as a whole. It opens with a bang, as "Cat 'n' Mouse" reimagines the deadly ritual between cartoon rivals in a comedy of dynamite and anvils--a masterly prologue that sets the stage for the alluring, very grown-up twists that follow. Part one, "Vanishing Acts," features stories of risk and escape: a lonely woman disappears without a trace; a high school boy becomes entangled with his best friend's troubled sister; and a group of teenagers play a treacherous game that pushes them deep into "the kingdom of forbidden things." Excess reigns in the vivid, haunting places of Part two's "Impossible Architectures," where domes enclose whole cities, and a king's master miniaturist creates objects so tiny that soon his entire world is invisible. Finally, "Heretical Histories" presents startling alternatives to the remembered past. "A Precursor of the Cinema" proposes a new, enigmatic form of illusion. And in the astonishing "The Wizard of West Orange" a famous inventor sets out to simulate the sense of touch--but success brings disturbing consequences. Sensual, mysterious, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey through brilliantly realized labyrinths of mortal pleasures that stretch the boundaries of the ordinary world to their limits--and occasionally beyond.
Author Biography
STEVEN MILLHAUSER's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, was published in 1972 and several years later received the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. Since then he has published nine works of fiction, among them several collections of stories and novellas, as well as the novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He is also a recipient of the Lannan Award and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," from The Barnum Museum, was the basis of the film The Illusionist (2006), starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. Millhauser's work has been translated into fourteen languages. He is a Professor of English at Skidmore College, and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
