Once in a while one runs across an author whose work is so satisfying that it screams "More, more, more!" Not to mention "Bravo!" Steven Millhauser is such a writer for me. Somehow his name did not register when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for Martin Dressler: The Tale of An American Dreamer. His older collection of three novellas entitled Little Kingdoms (1993) fits right into the dreamy world invoked by the subtitle of his prizewinning novel.

Millhauser's work has been compared to both Poe and Borges, but I also see a touch of Italo Calvino and Bruno Schulz in the way he takes the reader through the looking glass and into magical worlds that seem almost real until you realize you are inside a dream or a fairy tale — the kind you don't want to end.

The three novellas in this book are about as different from each other as one could imagine, and each appeals, perhaps, to a different part of the imagination. The first story is a straightforward narrative in which one thing happens after another, leading to a climax; the second story is based on a fairy tale but with a unique metafictional vision, and the third purports to be a catalog of pictures at an exhibition but is in the end much more dramatic. Every reader will come away with his or her own favorite, but the stories are all amazing in their own way.

"The Little Kingdoms of J. Franklin Payne" — This story seems to have the broadest appeal judging from the reviews, but in terms of voice and tone it is the most prosaic. A Midwestern newspaper cartoonist gets a job at a New York newspaper. His cartoons have always been quite fanciful, and often involve a child at night in a toy shop where inanimate objects start to take on a life of their own. It is in New York were he begins doing animations of his fanciful ideas in his spare time. The more fanciful and bizarre his movie cartoons become, the more his own fanciful world departs from reality, and he gradually has trouble distinguishing between the two. The story ending is ambiguous in the most satisfying way.

"The Princess, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" — This is a brilliant, brilliant story. Maybe the story to end all stories. At once a fairy tale and a commentary on fairy tales, it addresses the elusiveness of truth behind a story, the complexity of different versions, and the rise and fall of different versions in public taste. The tone, attention to detail and unusual format all are reflections of an unusual mind. Millhauser caused this reader to see just how unimportant, in certain instances, endings really may be. It is the "storyness" of the story that grabs us. Millhauser does not allow one to read this story passively, merely absorbing the atmosphere, the thrill of adventure, the unfolding action, etc. He keeps the wheels turning, and it is the metafiction that makes this happen. Fairy tales are a lot like mystery stories, except that you want and are expecting a certain kind of ending. Millhauser shatters the need for a specific ending. He cleverly builds to a kind of climax just before he closes, and you realize that it was the story that was important and all the possibilities he cunningly planted in your head, just as he cunningly manipulated the thoughts of his characters. He talks the reader into an entirely new and unanticipated expectation. This is a work of true genius.

"Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846)" — No exhibition catalog ever read like this one! Here Millhauser has found a way to tell the story of four lives through what purport to be descriptions of 26 paintings, which have titles like "Galatea," "Clair de Lune," "Nachtstück," "The House of Usher," "Totentanz," filled with cultural references and nineteenth century Romantic musical and literary allusions. Some of the descriptions remind one vaguely of actual paintings, the unreal style of which must have been something like Van Gogh meets Turner with an overlay of Rothko. The dramatic lives of the four protagonists remind one of the excesses of Romanticism. Instead of an illustrated story, the pictures are the story in which, after reading all the captions, one has absorbed the intertwined biographies of four people. This is a very sophisticated approach to storytelling, entertaining in its own unique way.

Taken altogether, this was one of the most delightful and satisfying reads I have had in many years. I look forward to reading more of Steven Millhauser. Highly recommended! ( )

This collection of three novellas shows off Millhauser's skills, no doubt. However, what might be a fine collection is taken down by a conceit or two. Let's start with what goes right.

Millhauser has the ability to write somewhat bizarre things in a way that makes us just accept it and move on. I was reminded of this in the first story "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklyn Payne." It all starts with a walk through the night which might just be imaginary. Which sets the tone; the reader is left to wonder what, if any, of what follows is meant to be true. Payne is an artist for the local newspaper, but he has his own side project of developing animated movies. This is no Disney. The comics he draws for the newspaper would never work in real life. (In fact, you have to wonder if Millhauser is drawing a parallel to slice-of-life authors.) He refuses to scrimp on the movies he makes and, because of this, there are very few of them. He is alienating all around him (some deserved, some not deserved) until he finally finishes his magnum opus.

The story takes up over half of the book and deserves every page. It is magical and it is moving. And, in spite of the fact that we know this never could have happened, we are wrapped in its magic.

The second story has much of what makes Millhauser so good, but it also has some of the bad. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" is the story of a prince, his princess, a dwarf, and a visiting prince. Jealousy and evil intent spoil what should be a perfect marriage. This would be nothing more than a banal telling of just another fairy tale but for Millhauser's approach. Each section (comprised of one to three pages) is titled. At first, these just seem conventions, but they eventually lead us to understand that the story is not as clear-cut as we think it is, nor are we even sure who is telling the story. This results in multiple resolutions. Unfortunately, while the device of sectioning the story makes sense, it becomes tiring after a while and starts to feel like a trick used a few too many times. (What? Cut the lady in half again?)

The final story, "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810 – 1846),while a nice attempt, does little more than seemingly show off the author's ability to tell a story in a strange and unusual way. Nothing wrong with that approach, but when the showing off trumps the actual story, then there is a problem. The story is a collection of critiques of an artist's works; descriptions that include what the artist was going through at the time. That underlying story is interesting and the development of what is occurring to his friends by way of his paintings has a nice gothic sense to it. But the framing device is far too stilted and detracts from any enjoyment that might be had.

All said and done, this collection is still a good example of what Millhauser does that makes him worth reading. Come for the Little Kingdom, stick around for The Princess, and, since you are already here, go ahead and visit the Catalogue – but don't expect too much from the latter. ( )

I thought these stories had very unique concepts. Conceptually, I liked the novellas and would recommend them for their originality. In terms of the stories themselves, I was pretty unimpressed. The first one was the only one I liked much at all. The third had the best trick, but I can't stand it when writers try to do something unique with the narrative but don't stick with it (same reason I gave Amos Oz's Black Box low marks. ( )

Steven Millhauser's three novellas in "Little Kingdoms," show him focusing on artistic creation. The opening story is about a cartoonist who is also interested in creating animated films. The second is a fantasy-inspired tale that looks at how stories are created. The final story is an ambitious telling of a painter's life in the form of a catalog of his work. For fans of Millhauser, it's definitely worth a read. Read my longer review at http://www.examiner.com/books-in-richmond/steven-millhauser-displays-his-magic-l.... ( )

Steven Millhauser is one of my favorite writers. His stories always tread a fine line between the mundane and the fantastic; even the stories that on first glimpse appear to be set firmly in this world are, on closer inspection, just a degree away from reality. Millhauser’s stories and novels are highly imaginative, told in beautifully crafted prose – sometimes so beautifully crafted that it is transporting. Millhauser’s tales stay with you a long time, and if you read enough of his writing you start to notice his themes, particularly the nobility of work and the possibilities of the American dream.

Little Kingdoms is a collection of three novellas, rather an odd sort of book to find these days; readers tend to like their reading in big bricks (for example, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which clocks in at 576 pages, or Brandon Sanderson’s new book, The Way of Kings, which contains a whopping 1,008 pages) or in short stories (which are experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years, with single author collections turning into big-selling award winners, as with last year’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower). A novella is just long enough to usually require more than one burst of reading, barring a big chunk of free time on vacation, but doesn’t provide a complete world in which one can become lost for days at a time. They last just long enough to occupy your brain fully for two or three hours; but the good ones stay with you much longer.

The first novella in this collection is precisely that type of good one. “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne” is the story of a man who draws cartoons in the early years of the twentieth century. It begins on a July night in 1920, when Payne looks up from his work to discover that it is three o’clock in the morning. He decides to take a walk around his house in the balmy stillness of the blue night, taking a route I would wager none of us has ever attempted. The walk sets the tone for the entire story, which is largely an ode to Payne’s dedication to his craft, his art.

Millhauser writes gorgeous prose about the most common work, finding poetry in the way we go about our everyday lives. This passage, for instance, is extraordinary in the way it describes the ordinary:

"Franklin had to admit … that he had never felt better in his life. In the mornings he rose before the rattle of the milk bottles and, filled with a kind of energetic serenity, went downstairs in the bird-loud dark, showing its first streak of gray, to put up a pot of coffee and prepare fresh orange juice. He sliced the plump Florida oranges in half on the breadboard, pressed the juicy halves firmly against the upthrust knob of the juicer, and carefully checked for pips. Freight cars loaded with slatted boxes of oranges picked from sun-drenched trees in orchards in Florida had rushed through the night at sixty miles an hour through Goergia, the Carolinas, Virginia, all the way to the state of New York, where husky men with bulging veins in the upper arms had loaded the boxes onto trucks and driven them to country stores in northern villages, solely in order that he, Franklin Payne, could buy one dozen sun-ripened oranges and stand in his kitchen to make fresh orange juice for his wife and daughter. It was all astonishing, as astonishing as the milk that arrived in clear glass bottles every morning, with the cream clinging to the top, or the brightening air that poured through the large windows in their solid oak frames – yes, the whole world was simply pouring in on him."

To have a character so inhabit a moment – a perfectly normal moment, one that most of us glide through without even paying attention – is a virtuoso performance. The mindfulness involved in thinking of the journey of the orange from field to juice glass a thousand miles away is inspiring. That a writer would consider that worth writing about explains why I find Millhauser so amazing.

Payne travels through his life, sometimes paying attention, sometimes not – and the “not” causes him some huge problems. Throughout the story, though, the writing remains luminous. This book is worth owning for this novella alone.

The other two novellas are interesting postmodern works, also beautifully written, but not nearly as compelling as “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne.” “The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon” delves deep into a fairy tale world and makes it real – but at the same time makes it irrelevant except as a fairy tale. In other words, the fairy story is stripped of its mystery and magic and made an ordinary tale of love and loss. When the fairy story becomes so real, it loses the resonance it normally has, and becomes merely sad. The story is told in paragraphs, each with a title of sorts that warns what the paragraph will discuss, a chopping of the story into bits that works to focus the reader’s attention on how the story is gradually, slowly, becoming the story of an unhappy marriage rather than a glossy story of happily ever after. No character has a name; all are defined simply by their role. The town below the castle seems irrelevant to the denizens of the castle, even as the town sees the castle as good for nothing but stories. It’s an interesting technique, one that makes the characters simultaneously emotionally resonant and emotionally distant.

The third novella, “Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846),” is another postmodern piece, in which Millhauser tells the story of a fictional artist’s life by examining his artworks. The story has the tone of a scholarly work, leavened by the liberal use of quotations from the journals of the various characters in the artist’s life: his sister, his friend, his friend’s sister. Many of the artworks are described in such a way as to suggest that the canvases are almost entirely black or white, with figures so blurred and indistinct as to be nothing more than implied rather than portrayed. Yet by examining these canvases, the scholar-narrator manages to tell the story of the artist’s life and loves. It’s an intriguing conceit. The story reveals once again Millhauser’s fascination with work as fundamental to the human experience, and the art of storytelling (be it through painting, cartooning or writing) to be the art of transforming work into fable.

Little Kingdoms rewards the reader’s close attention. Millhauser is experimenting here, and succeeding – though, to my mind, the first and most straightforward of the novellas is the best. Even there, though, Millhauser is writing a sort of New Weird tale, in which dissonance and mindfulness both are critical to the story. Millhauser’s characters play close attention to everything, and as a result they see what is odd and off-kilter in the world; they manipulate it to create works of their own, thus binding themselves to and perpetuating the Weird. The odd in the ordinary is ultimately what is most attractive about these stories. ( )