From Amazon.com
Dalkey Archive Press brings back into print Millhauser's classic and acclaimed stories in their American Literature series. The imagery alone is stunning, but coupled with Millhauser's insights into human flights and foibles, these fictions hold both truth and a surreal, disturbing beauty.
Surely novelist Kirsten Bakis (Lives of the Monster Dogs) and Millhauser in his story "August Eschenburg" had the same dream the same night about their characters. Both are named August, both are creators, and both must confront the troubling issues between what is human and what is humanlike. August Eschenburg creates automatons with such art that they appear to be alive--for very brief performances. His art is copied and subverted by Hausenstein, who builds what the audiences seem to want: automatons whose sexual characteristics are grossly exaggerated in huge rolling hips, leering faces, and large breasts. Art falls prey to popular entertainment when August's benefactor dumps him for--you guessed it--the rosier robot. Like Kafka's "Hunger Artist," August as artist will be drawn back to his art by an urge stronger than mere economics, an urge that applies to artists such as independent press publishers as well!
From Publishers Weekly
Magic, dark fantasy and enchantment provide the recurrent atmosphere and literary mode of this collection of seven stories by the author of Portrait of a Romantic, the first, "August Eschenburg," of novella length. In the title narrative, a 12-year-old leaves the brilliant sunlight of the "real" world to enter a penny arcade he dimly recalls from his childhood. He is in search of "an overwhelming secret . . . something mysterious and elusive that I could scarcely name." But the mechanical gunslinging cowboy proves a creaking, absurd figure and the fortune teller a decayed ruin. The endless disrobing of the nickelodeon woman can still reveal inexhaustible secrets. Then once again the glory fades and the boy concludes that only faith, if it can be retrieved, will restore the wonder that once was. In another tale, an adolescent girl undergoes a series of mysterious changes on the jagged path to self-knowledge; and "Cathay" is a series of magical vignettes situated in an enchanted land of marvelous transformations and exotic rituals. While the meaning of the stories can be willfully enigmatic and the writing at times self-conscious and labored, the prose can also be strong and vivid. There can be no doubt of the author's distinctive imaginative gifts, originality and flair. January 6
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
