Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories » (Bargain)

Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He teaches at Skidmore College.

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 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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Steven Millhauser is a virtuoso of extremes, and in particular of extremes of scale. He began with the diminutive: his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse (1972), is the biography of a novelist who dies at age 11 -- think of Boswell's Life of Johnson mixed with a sinister amount of Nabokov's Pale Fire and then reduced, by a process known to Millhauser alone, to the two-thirds scale of the schoolyard. His best-known book, the novel Martin Dressler, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, reaches toward the other end of the spectrum: our hero, Dressler, builds hotels of increasing grandeur, culminating with the Grand Cosmo, which is so large that it is literally a universe unto itself. The Cosmo is a disaster, and Dressler is ruined: the extremes are not kind to those who reach them, or reach for them.