The Barnum Museum

Steven Millhauser author Steven Milhauser author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:24th Apr '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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The Barnum Museum cover

The Barnum Museum is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of short stories. Within its pages, note such sights as: a study of the motives and strategies used by the participants in the game of Clue, including the seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard; the Barnum Museum, a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it; a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman - and loses her to an imaginary man! - and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured.

Steven Millhauser's stories are as dense with minute realistic detail as a 15th-century Flemish painting, but they never fail to take a sharp turn into fantasy. Imagination is his favorite subject as well as his precision instrument. His fiction is about virtuosity, especially his own. But it's also about the way imagination takes possession of the world and the imaginer. Entertainment Weekly Imagine a funhouse gallery of fictive techniques and ideas, and you'll have some sense of these stories... 'A Game of Clue' delineates the line between strategy and chance in a board game while plotting the relationships among the players. 'Klassik Komix #1' is a riotous pop comic version of 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.'.. Millhauser's distinctive mix of stylistic dazzle and erudite wonder will intrigue admirers of his Edwin Mullhouse, In the Penny Arcade, and From the Realm of Morpheus. Library Journal

ISBN: 9781564781796

Dimensions: 215mm x 140mm x 18mm

Weight: 358g

240 pages