Steven Millhauser. (2015). Voices in the Night: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Steven Millhauser. 2015. Voices in the Night: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Steven Millhauser. Voices in the Night: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Millhauser, Steven
   • bioText: STEVEN MILLHAUSER is the author of numerous works of fiction, including Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of the Story Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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Voices in the Night

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler: sixteen new stories—“spellbinding, masterly, sublime” (The New York Times Book Review)—that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit.

Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies.
Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream.
Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Tania James, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Spellbinding, masterly, sublime . . . Voices in the Night abounds with marvels. The stories are anchored by dark human yearnings--for perfection, or excitement, or some ungraspable form of fulfillment. These yearnings have a combustible quality. Beware the uncanny magic of Millhauser: Just when you think you recognize a myth, a character, a voice, the familiar tacks toward the strange and unexpected . . . His flexible voice allows for many a quantum leap. The title story, brief as it is, offers a whole universe through the pinhole of a single memory. Millhauser gives us worlds upon worlds--wistful and warped, comic and chilling--that by story's end, feel as intimate as our own reflections."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Dale Singer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
   • content: "Sixteen stories, from new versions of classics like Rapunzel, to modern-day tales where humdrum, everyday life becomes something quite different--when the normal moves, sometimes slowly and sometimes swiftly, into the strange. . . . Millhauser's stories bristle with humanity. And the way he moves slowly, almost stealthily toward his conclusions, is a marvel to watch and a pleasure to read."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
   • content: "The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Millhauser, celebrated for exploring the strangeness lurking in everyday life, riff[s] on classic and religious fables. His inventiveness shows no sign of waning . . . Throughout the collection, he veers into the realm of fantasy with unsettling and mordantly funny results."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe
   • content: "Masterful . . . intriguing and disturbingly intoxicating. Millhauser's readers have grown accustomed to [his] spectacular feats of literary derring-do thanks to a splendid four-decade career spent enriching the world with narratives that trigger every possible emotion . . . Many of the stories in Voices in the Night are set in Millhauserian towns where romantic nostalgia dukes it out with disquieting realities; characters must process their encounters with the uncanny without breaking their rose-colored glasses. Voices in the Night contains its share of fairy tales, too, [where] mystical happenings are not unexpected, but remain unnerving . . . In this collection, Millhauser's feats are just as outsize as Paul Bunyan's."
5. • premium: False
   • source: M. Scott Krause, Vegas Seven
   • content: "A master storyteller. Voices in the Night offers 16 new stories with much to appreciate. He tackles tall tales, fairy tales, mermaids and baseball . . . . Millhauser is frequently whimsical and often funny, but he tackles serious subjects. There's a lot of death and finality swirling around Voices in the Night, but don't let that scare you. Millhauser doesn't tell readers what to think about these heavy themes; he just writes clever stories that make it impossible not to think about them. Unforgettable. Four stars."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Arun Rath, National Public Radio
   • content: "A tour de force . . . What happens to a small town when something strange and supernatural takes over? Pulitzer Prize-winning author Millhauser explores that intersection of familiar life and disturbing, often bizarre events in Voices in the Night."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Time
   • content: "Pulitzer Prize winner Millhauser imbues classic fables with a hyperrealistic sensibility in this collection of 16 stories. In his capable hands, figures like Rapunzel, Buddha, and Paul Bunyan assume new and dazzling nuances."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Valerie Miner, Chicago Tribune
   • content: "Evanescent and bloody, obsessive and meditative, historical and futuristic, dystopian and romantic: Millhauser's brilliant work thrives in the fecund, mucky cracks of human contradictions. The stories in Voices in the Night revise traditional tales, entwine shadows of individual terror and community panic, and dazzle with nimble allegory. Millhauser's characters seek improvement, order and happiness, usually finding or making trouble in the process . . . He plays fluidly across genre--gothic, horror, hyperrealism, fables--and evokes not only his acknowledged influences, Nabokov and Mann, but also Poe, Calvino, Borges and Millet. In these stories he savors the perverse, morbid and dark; yet some tales add lighter touches to scriptural history and the fairy canon. His virtuosity i
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 2, 2015
     In this vividly imaginative new collection of 16 stories, Pulitzer Prize–winner Millhauser (Martin Dressler) draws a gauzy curtain of hyper-reality over mundane events and creates an atmosphere of uneasiness that accelerates to dread. Millhauser establishes tense yet wondrous tones while never resorting to melodrama; his cool, restrained voice is profoundly effective. In a couple of stories (“Sons and Mothers,” “Coming Soon”) the protagonist wakens in a different time zone after a nap and understands that his life has changed forever. In others, the narrator is a spokesperson for his community, places where residents get caught up in mass hysteria (“Elsewhere”), psychosis (“Mermaid Fever”), or a craving for deep emotion (“The Place”). Variations on fairy tales include a clever, humorous “Rapunzel,” which is reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Less successful is “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” a narrative of Buddha in his youth; the languor that evokes the heat and exoticism of India slows the story to a crawl. The gem of the collection is the semi-autobiographical “A Voice in the Night,” in which a young boy in the author’s own home town in Connecticut is transfixed by the biblical story of Samuel, who heard God’s voice and knew he must obey. The boy grows up to be a writer, with memories similar to those in Millhauser’s earlier book The Barnum Museum. This is a volume best read in small doses, since the voices throughout remain similar and the situations often echo one another. The cumulative effect is to transport the reader to an alternate world in which the uncanny lurks pervasively beneath the surface.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 1, 2015
      A master storyteller continues to navigate the blurry space between magic and reality in 16 comic, frightening, consistently off-kilter tales.As a short story writer, Millhauser (English/Skidmore College; We Others, 2011, etc.) 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. His strategy remains the same in this collection, but there's little sign that his enthusiasm has weakened. In "Miracle Polish," a man buys a mirror-cleaning chemical that makes his reflection slightly but meaningfully more upbeat and glimmering; a sly riff on the myth of Narcissus ensues. "A Report on Our Recent Troubles" describes a community wrecked by a spate of suicides, some seemingly done as perverse pleas for attention, and the narrative slowly edges toward a harrowing, Shirley Jackson-esque conclusion. That story, like many of the others here, is written in the first person plural, and Millhauser revels in upending that bureaucratic voice and making it strange; he satirizes the language of rest-home brochureware in "Arcadia," which opens gently but becomes more sinister, darkening the bland rhetoric. Millhauser does much the same with setting, complicating our notions of suburban comfort in stories like "The Wife and the Thief." As ever, he's 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.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2015
      In his latest collection of intriguing, innovative, and evocative stories, Pulitzer Prizewinner Millhauser (Martin Dressler, 1996) appropriates Buddhist mythology, American folktales, promotional brochures, and official reports as he focuses on the blurred line between the mundane and the fantastic, between skepticism and belief. Here, seemingly normal communities confront such extraordinary events as mass hysteria, cults, ghosts, and other psychic phenomena. Distant suburban towns, exurbs exotic in their ordinariness embrace their strangeness. In Phantoms, a town's long history of mysterious visitors is related through case studies along with possible explanations: are they just delusions or the ghosts of previous residents? In Mermaid Fever, a town deals with the aftermath of the discovery of the body of a 16-year-old mermaid that washes up on its shores. A Report on Our Recent Troubles recounts a disturbing fad for suicide and a town's even more disturbing proposal for dealing with it. A dreamlike quality permeates Sons and Mothers, in which a son's unannounced visit to his mother conjures feelings of loss and regret, and Coming Soon, in which a town's frenzy of development makes it virtually unrecognizable in an instant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 15, 2014
      

      A Pulitzer Prize winner for the novel Martin Dressler, Millhauser also works well in the short form, as his recent Story Prize winner, We Others: New and Selected Stories, attests. Here are 16 pieces that investigate our inner voices in achingly real language, some showing how we are contained within our town, our homes, and ourselves and others veering off into religion or fairy tale.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 15, 2015
      

      Imagine a town crier delivering updates to the world in the form of newsletter or annual holiday card. This is the dominant voice of this latest collection from Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Martin Dressler. Half the stories, including "Phantoms," "Mermaid Fever," "A Report on Our Recent Troubles," "Elsewhere," and "The Place," are told in the voice of The Town. "Arcadia," the darkest of the stories, is a brochure advertising a suicide retreat complete with a suite of amenities found only in a luxury resort. There is a touch of magic realism as well, including phantoms, ghosts, mermaids, and a magical bottle of furniture polish, all revealing a sense of loss, longing, and an emptiness that cannot be expressed by ordinary means. The weakest pieces, e.g., the lengthy "The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Guatama," move beyond town life, but the change in tone and voice is quite jarring and not entirely successful. VERDICT Millhauser's wry humor really shines in these off-kilter stories of town life. Despite a few lesser pieces, this enjoyable collection is highly recommended.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler: sixteen new stories—“spellbinding, masterly, sublime” (The New York Times Book Review)—that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit.

Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies.
Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince,...

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