From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author hailed by The New Yorker as “a virtuoso of waking dreams” comes a dazzling new coll...
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Oct 05, 2011
Shawn
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Thanks to a good friend, I have now been introduced to this exceptional writer. It always pleases me to find new, inventive writers who touch on my interests yet are writing in the "lit" world, as it implies to me a continuum of writing, without having to resort to either strict definitions of genre, nor this modern silliness of "there are no genres" or "lit is also a genre". I believe in porous borders.
In a way, the joy of these stories come in each u More...
In a way, the joy of these stories come in each u More...
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Apr 06, 2008
Melinda
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This batch of freaky fables is like a trip to the Museum of Human Frailty: each story a carefully composed diorama displaying realms of excess, obsession, and emptiness. Although I really did enjoy this collection (particularly the haunting "Vanishing Acts" section) I was a little disappointed in the predictable trajectory of the "Impossible Architectures" stories: one idea after another is pursued to the oblivion of its logical extreme, which got to be a bit redundant and n
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Jan 31, 2009
Katie
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I really liked the first few stories, a LOT. Then I was surprised when it switched into this third-rate Borges cerebral fairy tale stuff. I love Borges. Maybe part of why Borges is so good is, he knew when an idea only warranted a paragraph or two. As for this book, I would recommend getting it and reading the first few stories and then stopping and if you want to read some cerebral fairy tales, get yourself some Borges.
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Jul 24, 2011
Tung
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In this collection of short stories, Millhauser presents to the reader various scenes set in a world that is a version of the real world, only with slightly surreal twists. Each twist applied by Millhauser forces the reader to examine different themes and concepts from unique perspectives. For example, in the titular story, the youth in a small town organize underground parties where the attendees laugh loudly and for long periods of time instead of drinking or doing drugs. This element of secre
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Feb 28, 2009
Joseph
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I had heard quite a bit about Millhauser being this great modern practitioner of the modern short story and then I read his essay about "The Ambition of the Short Story" in the New York Times Book Review and wanted to give him a shot, but ultimately I found this collection wanting.
The stories seem to make their point and then stretch themselves and then overstretch themselves and then beat you over the head with their message.
The first story, a story that peop More...
The stories seem to make their point and then stretch themselves and then overstretch themselves and then beat you over the head with their message.
The first story, a story that peop More...
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Jul 11, 2008
Rifftrafft
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more/less a bunch of stories that explore human obsessions, the best of that bunch being the ones where those obsessions are about transcending our own physical/mental limitations. the plots are sweeping and very compressed, very reportorial and sometimes very parable-like. there is often no character per se--society at large, or the character of a given community, is the main character. so there's a story about a society building a tower all the way up to heaven. there's another story about a t
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Jun 21, 2008
Frank
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I first encountered Millhauser in Harper's and The New Yorker. Encountering his work in a magazine is like unexpectedly finding a portal into an alternate universe. A man writes a letter to his wife in which he explains why he's elected to stop speaking because of the inadequacy of language. A miniaturist pursues his art past the threshold of the visible. Suicide becomes a popular fad in a suburban town.
Reading an entire book of MIllhauser's eerie stories in some way dampens the ple More...
Reading an entire book of MIllhauser's eerie stories in some way dampens the ple More...
Feb 05, 2009
Pulitzer Prize‚Äö_Ń"winner Steven Millhauser (Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer) has focused his attention in recent years on the novella and short fiction. The author culls his latest collection from stories published in The New Yorker, Harper's, and other venues over the last decade. Any collection drawn from such diverse sources and compiled over a period of time will strike some readers as disconnected. All critics welcome Millhauser's return and compare the best of these s
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Jan 09, 2009
Tony
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Millhauser, Steven. DANGEROUS LAUGHTER. (2008). ****. This is a collection of thirteen short stories by this Pulitzer Prize winning author. He has arranged them into three categories, along with an opening “cartoon.” The cartoon is a short story about a cat and a mouse – a la Tom and Jerry. The cat is always chasing the mouse, while the mouse successfully eludes him. The story then devolves into a closer examination by both characters as to what is the real meaning of their lifes. How s
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Dec 13, 2008
Brayden
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It's been a while since I've read a short story collection. While I like short stories, I tend to lose focus reading an entire collection, preferring the sustained plot of a novel. But Dangerous Laughter held my attention throughout. It is fascinating and extremely well-written, pulling you into strange worlds eerily similar to our own but always distorted in some way.
On the surface, the short stories in this book are about mundane details: the art of building miniatures, the work of a More...
On the surface, the short stories in this book are about mundane details: the art of building miniatures, the work of a More...
Jan 04, 2012
Christina Marie
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Steven Millhauser writes about not only the human experience, but also the cartoon experience. His most recent collection of shorts, Dangerous Laughter, begins by delving into the psyche of the cartoon cat and mouse, and their inevitable chase, the cat's compulsion and the mouse's smarts. How's that for a hook?
Split into three more parts, the collection has several voices. Vanshishing Acts deals with mysterious normalcies of life. It takes usual moments and sends them into absurdity. More...
Split into three more parts, the collection has several voices. Vanshishing Acts deals with mysterious normalcies of life. It takes usual moments and sends them into absurdity. More...
Jan 23, 2010
Nan
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The first story in this collection - a blow by blow description of a Tom and Jerry (or something like) cartoon - is one of the most powerful things I've ever read. Millhauser is addicted to minutiae, and each of these stories is about taking things to extremes, very often extremes of size. After a while, that becomes a little tedious and feels almost like a gimmick; this is not a book to be read over a couple of weeks, as I did, but one to put down for a good amount of time between stories.
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Nov 15, 2009
David
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A funny, exotic title Steven Millhauser named it when I first saw the title. Having met Steven Millhauser and listening to him read the excerpts from the book, I thought this book was going to be pretty interesting. There are certainly laughter involved, but it wasn't as good as I expected. I guess when our expectations goes too high, we are often disappointed. But I will say, this book was still extraordinary. The first story starts off with a cat chasing a mouse- the typical Tom and Jerry scen
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Sep 24, 2009
Pamela
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Steven Millhauser has a knack for taking an idea to its most ridiculous limit. Say you’re building a tower—why not build it all the way up to Heaven? Say you’re a fashion designer—why not create dresses as large as townships that reveal nothing of the female form underneath?
Millhauser’s also a master at prodding the weird gaps in our life. He delves into the weirdness of laughter and the false marriage of word to meaning. In doing so, he throws everything up into the air: why do we l More...
Millhauser’s also a master at prodding the weird gaps in our life. He delves into the weirdness of laughter and the false marriage of word to meaning. In doing so, he throws everything up into the air: why do we l More...
Jun 21, 2009
Theresa
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Steven Millhauser, you had me at old-timey, "How do you do, madame?"
After a disappointing collection by what I thought was a reliable author, I picked up another set of short stories based purely on the appeal of its cover. According to the info. on the back, the image was culled from The Advertising Archives. Very Mad Men. Dangerous Laughter really took me by surprise. I know I probably shouldn't say this because the summer has barely begun and because I'll be damning More...
After a disappointing collection by what I thought was a reliable author, I picked up another set of short stories based purely on the appeal of its cover. According to the info. on the back, the image was culled from The Advertising Archives. Very Mad Men. Dangerous Laughter really took me by surprise. I know I probably shouldn't say this because the summer has barely begun and because I'll be damning More...
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Sep 22, 2011
Billy
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I appreciate the fact that the stories can’t be easily put in the same old categories, and there were no middle aged men or women at a dinner with their odd collection of friends who wander outside and stare at the stars and smoke a joint, but this collection just didn’t do it for me. It seems to be made up entirely of things I would like, but didn't.
All the stories have elements in common, maybe too much. It almost seems like variations on a theme at times. There is usually an in More...
All the stories have elements in common, maybe too much. It almost seems like variations on a theme at times. There is usually an in More...
Jan 17, 2010
Shari
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I can see why some readers may appreciate this book, but not why it made the NYT list of best books of 2008. Totally not my style and, honestly, the stories are very, very weird.
I'm calling this book "read" even though I couldn't get through the last story. Each story seems to involve some sort of absurdity or paradox, and most also involve disappearance. I didn't really like the voice in most of the stories.
I very much read books for characters, character devel More...
I'm calling this book "read" even though I couldn't get through the last story. Each story seems to involve some sort of absurdity or paradox, and most also involve disappearance. I didn't really like the voice in most of the stories.
I very much read books for characters, character devel More...
Apr 04, 2009
Mark
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Many of Steven Millhauser's stories remind me of E.T.A. Hoffmann's. Dangerous Laughter contains stories with a wider array of styles than I'm used to from him. His earlier collections that I've read (The Knife Thrower, The Barnum Museum, In the Penny Arcade) are dominated by his imaginary histories of characters in the nineteen century who become experts in one of the burgeoning technologies of the era (clockwork automatons, magic, electricity, etc.). Dangerous Laughter has two stories along the
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Jan 27, 2011
CJ
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I really enjoyed this book.
The first story, "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman," borders on perfection. A well-crafted locked room mystery, this story has themes and characters that transcend the pages of the book. It had me thinking (and still has me thinking) about what happens when people stop noticing other people.
The other three stories in the first section (entitled "Vanishing Acts") were good, but as a friend mentioned in her review, they wer More...
The first story, "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman," borders on perfection. A well-crafted locked room mystery, this story has themes and characters that transcend the pages of the book. It had me thinking (and still has me thinking) about what happens when people stop noticing other people.
The other three stories in the first section (entitled "Vanishing Acts") were good, but as a friend mentioned in her review, they wer More...
Jan 16, 2010
jeremy
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the thirteen short stories that comprise dangerous laughter are richly imagined and refreshingly inventive. after being unexpectedly charmed by the first five stories, however, the remainder of the book, for me, veered ever too closely to the realm of tedium. perhaps reading each story as they had first appeared in print (in the new yorker, tin house, harper's, et al) may have allowed their bewitching effects to endure, but reading them all in succession within this collection lent them an air
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Feb 06, 2010
Bree
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Dangerous Laughter is a quirky and compelling collection of short stories. Each one has a slightly odd and other wordly plot, but says something insightful and poignent about our daily lives. One of my favorite stories focuses on a woman who fades away until she is completely gone becuase she is so bland that she escapes the notice of others. This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. The sentences are crisp and well constructed, descriptive without being flori
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Mar 11, 2009
Thomas
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Nov 21, 2009
Amy C.
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This is a collections of 13 short stories divided into 4 topics: "Opending Cartoon", "Vanishing Acts", "Impossible Architectures", and "Heretical Histories". I was most fascinated by the stories in "Vanishing Acts" because all the stories share a theme of disappearance. For example, in one story, a girl disappeared because no one had noticed her. Although some people might laugh at how silly this idea is, it is analogical on many levels in our so
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May 12, 2009
Michael
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Having recently watched Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, I was struck by the thematic similarities between the film and several of Millhauser's stories- primarily: The Dome, The Other Town, A Change in Fashion, Here at the Historical Society, and In the Reign of Harad IV. The ideas at the heart of these stories, much like those in the Kaufman film, gradually morph and grow obsessively out of control until they reach epic (or sometimes tiny) proportions. These bizarre ev
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Jan 23, 2011
Kelsey
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I would like to say right away that I really enjoyed the stories in this collection but I have a problem with the collection as a whole. I had encountered two of the stories out of the context of the collection (wizard of west orange, and in the reign of harad) and was deeply impressed by both. And when I started reading the book I loved the first several stories but after a while I felt like I was seeing the same trick multiple times. As I read on, whenever I would encounter the suspicion of an
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Mar 10, 2009
Alexis
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The first story is amazing. The rest are quaint. I feel like I'm reading Robert Louis Stevenson or old 40s SF (think John Wyndham). Meanwhile there's a whiff of ambition to sound like DeLillo. People think if you're not into them you don't like the intellectualism or "distance" but when the narrator recites a 14-item list of what "we of the Historical Society" provide in their archives, it's just filler to set the pedantic, sly style of the narration. And the intellect g
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Mar 27, 2009
Wilsontherocker
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Millhauser's stories hit all the right notes in me and leave me with a feeling of wide-eyed wonder. Yes, there's a similar device used in all these stories, but even so, Millhauser overcomes any predictability with the revelations that end his stories. Often at the end of one of his stories I'm thinking, "Woah, that was awesome!"
I don't think everyone will be as enchanted with these stories as I am. Many of them lack a strong emotional connection to the reader due to their More...
I don't think everyone will be as enchanted with these stories as I am. Many of them lack a strong emotional connection to the reader due to their More...
Jun 18, 2009
Sarah
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Creative, but often felt contrived or artificial. The extremely detailed descriptions were almost tiring to read. In general, I feel like these stories are not full-fledged stories, but fleshed-out ideas. There is a distinct question behind each story: What if historians were obsessed with cataloging what happened today instead of what happened long ago? What if being ignored made people physically disappear? What if the next town over was an exact replica of your town, only no one could live th
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Mar 09, 2010
Henry
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I didn't really enjoy this book because after ever few pages, there is another new story. Sometimes its confusing because its hard to keep up with what goes with what because the 13 sections of the book is different so i found it confusing. But the main point about this book was that people mysteriously are getting killed. Most of the time the cause is unknown. Some characters that get killed are usually strange because of how they are socially, for ex: in the first part of the book a girl was k
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Nov 23, 2009
Camille
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Dangerous Laughter is a collection of wonderfully imaginative and thoughtful short stories. The thirteen stories are grouped into 3 themes which provide some structure and a through-line for 13 otherwise unrelated stories. Overall I think the collection would benefit by the trimming of a few stories. There was quite a bit of redundancy and at times I felt I was being forced fed the theme. Towards the end I got bored.
The title story Dangerous Laughter and The Room in the Attic are beautif More...
The title story Dangerous Laughter and The Room in the Attic are beautif More...
