In the Penny Arcade

Winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.

Publishers Weekly

Magic, dark fantasy and enchantment provide the recurrent atmosphere and literary mode of this collection of seven stories by the author of Portrait of a Romantic, the first, ``August Eschenburg,'' of novella length. In the title narrative, a 12-year-old leaves the brilliant sunlight of the ``real'' world to enter a penny arcade he dimly recalls from his childhood. He is in search of ``an overwhelming secret . . . something mysterious and elusive that I could scarcely name.'' But the mechanical gunslinging cowboy proves a creaking, absurd figure and the fortune teller a decayed ruin. The endless disrobing of the nickelodeon woman can still reveal inexhaustible secrets. Then once again the glory fades and the boy concludes that only faith, if it can be retrieved, will restore the wonder that once was. In another tale, an adolescent girl undergoes a series of mysterious changes on the jagged path to self-knowledge; and ``Cathay'' is a series of magical vignettes situated in an enchanted land of marvelous transformations and exotic rituals. While the meaning of the stories can be willfully enigmatic and the writing at times self-conscious and labored, the prose can also be strong and vivid. There can be no doubt of the author's distinctive imaginative gifts, originality and flair. January 6

Steven Millhauser was born in 1943 in New York City, and grew up in Connecticut. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965, and went on to pursue a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation, but did complete a novel that was eventually published in a pared-down form under the title From the Realm of Morpheus—as well as Edwin Mullhouse.

However, it was for his stories that Millhauser became best known;
immaculately written, curiously vivid, they trod on fantastic boards in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, but with a distinctively American voice. After In the Penny Arcade, Millhauser's collections continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). Steven Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and teaches at Skidmore College.