Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119188 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of the virtues of Millhauser's new collection, which focuses on the misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition. The citizens who build insulated domes over their houses in The Dome escalate their ambitions to great literal and figurative heights, but the accomplishment becomes bittersweet. The uncontrollably amused adolescents in the book's title story, who gather together for laughing sessions, find something ultimately joyless in their mirth. As in earlier works like The Barnum Museum, Millhauser's tales evolve more like lyrical essays than like stories; the most breathlessly paced sound the most like essays. The painter at the center of A Precursor of the Cinema develops from entirely conventional works to paintings that blend photographic realism with inexplicable movement, to—something entirely new. Similarly, haute couture dresses grow in A Change in Fashion until the people beneath them disappear, and the socioeconomic tension Millhauser induces is as tight as a corset. Though his exaggerated outlook on contemporary life might seem to be at once uncomfortably clinical and fantastical, Millhauser's stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending his peculiar domain further than ever. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine

One reason why Steven Millhauser is consistently so much fun to read -- whether he's writing novels, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, or the short stories he clearly loves even more -- is that he has never forgotten what it was like to be an 11-year-old boy, fueled by curiosity and wonder, trying to make the banal world around him fit his comic-book image of how things should be. But for all of their boyish enthusiasms and fantastic, even gothic, trappings, Millhauser's novels and stories deal with decidedly complex themes. Among his favorites: the price of obsession, the folly of hubris and the inevitable collapse of best-laid plans under the weight of their designers' passion.

Now, with Dangerous Laughter, he has given us a collection of stories that explore these ideas with the mixture of dark suspense and good humor implied by the title. Everything one has come to want and expect in Millhauser's fiction is here -- spooky attics, fantastic inventions, artists driven mad, and ambitious enterprises that become overattenuated and impossible to sustain. The result is almost a Steven Millhauser primer, a much needed fix for fans who've been waiting since The King in the Tree (2003) and a perfect introduction for those unacquainted with his writing.

After opening with "Cat 'n' Mouse," which hilariously describes not only the violent exploits but also the surprisingly reflective inner lives of a pair of cartoon characters, Millhauser moves past the animated short and gets right to the featured presentations. "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" reads like collective noir, as an entire community tries to solve the mystery of a woman's vanishing and ends up implicating itself. The bookish adolescent in "The Room in the Attic" finds himself in a classic Millhauserian scenario: wandering through a friend's pitch-black attic, hidden inside which is the strange object of his growing obsession.

In Martin Dressler, Millhauser chronicled the life of a developer whose ill-fated dream was to build the largest hotel in the world. "In the Reign of Harad IV" details the obsession of another dreamy builder, this one a melancholic miniaturist in the court of an ancient king whose wish is to keep creating ever-smaller masterpieces. Though he has already built a perfect toy replica of the king's 600-room palace, he nevertheless remains convinced that his work is too large. Eventually, he determines to labor exclusively "in the realm of the invisible," crafting works whose minute details can only be guessed at.

Had Italo Calvino written for "The Twilight Zone," the result might resemble "The Other Town," a Millhauser story in which the inhabitants of a rather ordinary-seeming village devote significant resources to the construction and maintenance of a second village, perfectly identical to their own in every way. Curious townspeople like to relax by crossing through the woods and emerging in their mirror-world, checking "to see whether the new stop sign has gone up, enter a neighbor's house to explore a rumor of adultery -- the necktie over the clock radio, the blue bra draped over the cordovan loafer."

In yet another story, "Here at the Historical Society," this obsession with replicating details -- which serves as a running theme throughout the book -- is gently satirized. Written as a slightly defensive mission statement from a civic institution under critical attack, the story explains why a local historical society has decided to abandon its old mission of exhibiting muskets, arrowheads and the like in favor of exploring the present (which the historian-narrator pricelessly refers to as the "New Past"). Thus his office now employs staffers "who count the needles of every fir tree and the specks of mica in every roof shingle, others who study the patterns of grass blades flying up behind a power mower and settling onto the cut grass. We record the sounds of dishes and silverware in the kitchens of our town, the exact fall of the shadows of fence posts and street signs. We investigate the bend in a blue rubber band wrapped around a morning newspaper lying on a sun-striped front porch."

The collection's final offerings -- one about a painter who has discovered a way to bring viewers, literally, into his canvases; the other about the mysterious goings-on behind closed doors at a barely fictionalized version of Thomas Edison's research lab -- are marvelous stories that make the suspension of disbelief feel like no work whatsoever. In fact, with few exceptions (both "The Tower," about a building that reaches to heaven, and the book's title story, about an unusual teenage fad, read like tendentious allegories whose referents are unclear), Millhauser has done nothing here to diminish his reputation as one of our most dazzling storytellers. "It was said that no matter how closely you examined one of the Master's little pieces, you always discovered some further wonder," he writes of his obsessive court miniaturist. The same could be said of Steven Millhauser.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winner Steven Millhauser (Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer) has focused his attention in recent years on the novella and short fiction. The author culls his latest collection from stories published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other venues over the last decade. Any collection drawn from such diverse sources and compiled over a period of time will strike some readers as disconnected. All critics welcome Millhauser’s return and compare the best of these stories (“Here at the Historical Society,” for example) to the work of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. Less popular are “The Tower,” about a literal Tower of Babel that struggles to rise, and other stories that embrace Big Ideas. Overall, Dangerous Laughter is a strong effortâ€"“not just brilliant but prescient” (New York Times Book Review)â€"and reading these stories is like picking up the “best of” collection of your favorite band: good memories, catchy hooks, and always something new in the familiar.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Left of Center
As in all of his work, Steven Millhauser creates worlds that are just to the left of the center of reality. Each story has a haunting quality that is impossible to quantify, and each keeps you wanting to know more about the inhabitants of his world. Some are thinly veiled allegories, some not so obtuse metaphors, but every one of these 13 stories makes the reader think more about his own world and his perception of it.

Strange Love
If you got this far, you should get the book. I don't think there is anything quite like Millhauser except, of course, for strange machines where you can put a quarter in and find yourself shrunk ala Tom Hanks.

This is a most enjoyable read even when you get weary of the current story only to go on to the next, better one.

O. Henry meets Stephen King, offspring ensues
Millhauser writes short stories that seem the illegitimate offspring of O. Henry and Stephen King, descriptive and spare, matter-of-fact and wry, dense and light.

I also reviewed The Barnum Museum (American Literature Series) collection that included the spare but dense story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" which became the very good movie "The Illusionist", a story whose theme is revisited and expanded in "A Precursor of the Cinema" here.

Millhauser begins the collection with "Cat 'N' Mouse", a frame by frame recounting of any or every Tom and Jerry cartoon, the animation and color and comic timing lovingly and perfectly described, with the added twist of the omniscient author who can explain and examine internal thoughts and motives. So the cat's constant and unrequited passion to kill and eat the mouse becomes the driving motivation of a life that would be rendered meaningless in the consummation of his desire.

"Is it therefore his own life that he seeks, when he lies awake plotting against the mouse? Is it, when all is said and done, himself that he is chasing? The cat frowns and scratches his nose."

The cartoon, and these questions, form a perfect frame around the remaining twelve stories that are evenly divided between people, places, and histories that at their best are places of wonder and desire that ache to exist, "The Barnum Museum", for example, from the earlier collection, and "Dangerous Laughter" from this set, which reminded me of what it meant to laugh intensely, openly, and uncontrollably. I realized, midway through this story, that I had somewhere lost that feeling, but Millhauser made me remember it and miss it intensely.

Some of the stories here are straight allegories, of the history of human spiritual searching ("The Tower"), of memory and nostalgia ("Here at the Historical Society"), and of memory and amusement ("The Other Town"). While well done, Millhauser's skill as a writer seems to push impatiently at the limiting framework of the allegorical form, and I find these less satisfying than his other stories.

Another set of stories here owe their features to the Kingsian side of the Millhauser family tree, with twists that turn dark and disturbing, the more so because of the surface calmness in Millhauser's telling. Most intriguing of these is "The Wizard of West Orange", in which Edison is on the verge of perfecting the haptograph (a sort of sensory phonograph). Millhauser makes the possibilities tantalizing and seemingly real (yes, I googled Edison and haptograph with the half-thought that it might be), and the feeling of longing he awakens stirs a sense of loss and regret by the end when the inventive process goes awry.

Could this collection be rated five stars? Nearly so. I reserve five-star ratings for those books about which I can unreservedly say upon closing the cover on the last page "What a classic!." On that scale, this Millhauser collection would earn a 4.5 star rating. My conclusions for Barnum were very similar, confirming a rating of very good but just short of classic.