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In the Penny Arcade: Stories
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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After the success of his first novels (Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic), Steven Millhauser went on to enchant critics and readers with two short story collections that captured the magic and beauty of his longer works in vivid miniature.The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of the author's gifts, from the story of "August Eschenburg," the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay," a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.
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Reviews for In the Penny Arcade
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4/5
33 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Millhauser seems like several different people to me, so different are his short stories from one another. The title story of this short collection, for instance, is an imaginative trip into a penny arcade in an alternate universe, where the machines have a life of their own, a knowingness that only a 12-year-old boy can understand. “August Eschenburg” also deals with toys, in a sense, but the clockwork figures in this tale are never anything more than a form of art – though a very special form that soon becomes entirely dispensable to its erstwhile audience. How does the lack of an audience affect the artist? What does the artist do with himself, what is the meaning of his life, once no one appreciates his work any longer? Does that mean what he does is no longer valid work? This peculiar tale is a fascinating exploration of the transitory nature of work, art and life. “Cathay” sounds like a chapter from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, only told with a greater grace and beauty. And a few stories seem to be completely realistic, with no touch of the fantastic: “The Sledding Party,” for instance, about a teenagers’ winter bash, or “A Protest Against the Sun,” about a family’s outing to the beach on a hot summer day. These stories are extraordinary.
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In the Penny Arcade - Steven Millhauser
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