Steven Millhauser

Millhauser, Steven (1943– ), American writer. His extraordinary novels Edwin Mullhouse (1972), From the Realm of Morpheus (1986), and Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) explore and transcend the boundaries between realism and fantasy. Clearly influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Millhauser has subtly revised classical fairy tales and challenged our interpretations of these tales in various collections of short stories: In the Penny Arcade (1986), The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower (1998). For instance, ‘The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad’ and ‘Alice Falling’ in The Barnum Museum are droll and highly sophisticated investigations of classical fairy tales that uncover new meanings in the exploits of Sindbad and Alice. In ‘The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon’ (Little Kingdoms) Millhauser transforms a fairy tale into a Gothic tale of jealousy and horror. ‘The New Automaton’ in The Knife Thrower recalls E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales and highlights a major theme in all of Millhauser's unusual ‘postmodern’ fairy tales: the exhaustion and abuse of the imagination. Paradoxically, Millhauser's compelling tales of magic realism seek to save humanity from nihilistic tendencies in imaginations run amok.

Bibliography

• Fowler, Douglas, ‘Steven Millhauser, Miniaturist’, Critique, 37 (winter 1996).
• Kinzie, Mary, ‘Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser’, Salmagundi, 92 (fall 1991).
• Salzman, Arthur M., ‘In the Millhauser Archives’, Critique, 37 (winter 1996).

— Jack Zipes