Description: "Vividly imaginative . . . In this new collection, Pulitzer Prize-winner Millhauser draws a gauzy curtain of hyper-reality over mundane events and creates an atmosphere of uneasiness that accelerates to dread. He establishes tense yet wondrous tones while never resorting to melodrama; his cool, restrained voice is profoundly effective . . . The gem of the collection is 'A Voice in the Night,' in which a young boy in the author's own home town is transfixed by the biblical story of Samuel, who heard God's voice and knew he must obey . . . The cumulative effect [of] the voices throughout is to transport the reader to an alternate world in which the uncanny lurks pervasively beneath the surface." -- Publishers Weekly "A master storyteller continues to navigate the blurry space between magic and reality in 16 comic, frightening, consistently off-kilter tales. Millhauser emerged in the '70s with his sensibility fully formed, taking Bernard Malamud's heady mixture of Jewish mysticism and urban life and expanding its reach to encompass palace courts and big-box suburbia. In this collection [he] complicat[es] our notions of suburban comfort [and] as ever [is] an incessant tinkerer with ages-old myths, fairy tales and religious stories: Among the best entries here are 'The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,' a tale of the young Buddha that pits foursquare language with its hero's roiling spiritual despair, and irreverent tweaks of tales about Paul Bunyan,Rapunzel, mermaids and the prophet Samuel. Millhauser intuits modes of storytelling like nobody else, and even his satire of sports-announcer-speak in 'Home Run' elevates the quotidian to the cosmic.A superb testament to America's quirkiest short story writer, still on his game."-- Kirkus (starred review)

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