Hay escritores secretos, y Steven Millhauser es uno de ellos. Son de ese tipo de escritores que quieren pasar desapercibidos y no conceden entrevistas, aunque sin llegar a los extremos de Salinger o Pynchon. En cuanto a sus historias, residen en un territorio indefinido, entre lo real y lo fantás...
I discovered Steven Millhauser several years ago, when I found his collection of short stories, The Knife Thrower, at a library sale. Milhauser’s technique is very particular in that it uses a realist-psychological approach only to better thwart it by infusing it with elements of fantastic ficti...
The first time I picked this up I devoured it, like the meal you begin eating simply because it is placed before you, but which tastes so good you cannot stop until you have finished it. When I put the book down I had to spend several minutes trying to figure out where I was. As it turns out, I h...
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
By this I do not mean simply that the difficult and exacting art of the automaton is carried by our masters to a pitch of brilliance unequaled elsewhere, and unimagined by the masters of an earlier age. Rather I mean that by its very nature our automaton theater is deserving of pride, for it is t...
He felt, without vanity, the satisfaction of a man who knows he has made the right choice. This was no boring backwater, as his friends had warned, no cute little village with one white steeple and two red gas pumps, but a lively, thriving town. Women in smart dresses and broad-brimmed straw hats...
It isn’t true, as some have said, that we knew nothing about it at the time and were later taken by surprise. How could that have been possible? It was right there, next to the mall, a big operation only partly concealed by a high fence, with trucks going in and out every day, to say nothing of t...