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"Kafka in High School, 1959" gives us snippets of Kafka (yes, thatKafka) as an awkward nerd going through the clumsy growing pains of a teenager. It's all too normal of an alternate history, bland, with sideways glimpses of how this teenager could turn into the author we know. One can see how the awkwardness could be magnified into the bleak work we already know. And in the end, things do go strangely.

Not done with this story yet, but had to capture this fragment: " . . . the dreadful freedom of someone who has jumped from a building and changed his mind.".

Ironically, I may be dead before my Latin is good enough to fully understand this. And yet, I persist.

Beginning my second reading of this classic. It's been, what, twenty years?

These Roman kids are spoiled brats.

The residents of a small town all fall asleep for three days in "A Tired Town". The narrator struggles to stay awake and, in so doing, experiences a silent moment on the cusp of something indescribable, but then succumbs to slumber. He awakens to the "cleanup" afterword with a sense that he somehow missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but he's not sure what it was. Serves as a reflection on busy-ness and calm.

Phone-tree hell is portrayed quite vividly in "Thank You For Your Patience". The person listening to the annoying repeated messages while waiting to speak to a human being shows her patience, even gives a practical sermon on her experiences with patience, revealing secrets to an uncaring machine. It's a sick twist on the tale of the suburban housewife, sick because it reveals just how pathetic some peoples lives are.

The communal theme continues with "Green" where changing fashions in landscaping (or the destruction thereof) swing wildly, with neighbors making bizarre changes to "keep up with the Jones's" in a strange display of conspicuous consumption. If you love to look good to everyone around you by following the latest trends, regardless of their utility or even sanity, well, this story is for you.

"The Circle of Punishment" begs comparison to the short fiction of Borges, Kafka, and Calvino. But Millhauser here turns "kafkaism" inside out while pushing "kafkaism" even deeper into the soul in such a way that the reader is unsure whether to be relieved or even more disturbed. I've coming away thinking far too much about the interiority of social prisons, punishment we impose on ourselves, deserved or not.

One thing Millhauser does really well is magic realism. "The Summer of Ladders" is a great example of this. The population of a town become obsessed with climbing ladders, with results that affect all the inhabitants, directly or indirectly. And an apotheosis might have happened. Maybe, just maybe. Or a disappearing act? As with most magic realism, it's so hard to tell. And in that ambiguity lies the magic.

"A Haunted House Story" channels Robert Aickman in all the right ways. haunters and the haunted are indistinguishable, and a view of utter happiness brings on a dark gloom of despair. This story will affect you, deeply, and you will not even understand quite why. But it burrows into you. And it stays. It's terrifying by not being terrifying at all . . . until it's over.

Roman medical practice = not great.

"The Fight" reminds us that coming of age stories can be fraught with fear and testosterone, when the fight or flight response is being honed in at such a visceral level that we don't even realize what is happening and the line between fact and fantasy blurs both for our relationships with others and for our image of our selves. Moving into proto-adulthood is no easy transition.

Recently picked up a Latin to English dictionary, which is really handy for knowing if I am understanding words correctly when trying to contextually determine meanings. The timing has dovetail nicely with my current reading. Just got to the dictionary section about body parts, and what am I reading about in Lingua Latine? Body parts!

In "Theater of Shadows," we continue with the theme of community, but this time, a community that embraces darkness and find themselves, purely by their desires and choices, in a liminal state somewhere between shadow and light. We refer to this state (though Millhauser does not) as a "Twilight Zone," and for good reason. This story is reflective (pardon the pun) of the best of Rod Serling's masterpieces.

Millhauser's best stories are often about community and it's complications. In "The Little People," a series of vignettes and encyclopedic entries about Greenhaven, a city within "our city" whose inhabitants are an average two inches tall, he addresses the joys and challenges, the loves and the prejudicial hates that arise between "our" culture and those of Greenhaven's residents. It's a fascinating reflection.

Just contacted and heard back from a bookstore up in Sturgeon Bay that I am obsessed with visiting, Within Things. I'll be taking Labor Day (they're open!) to go up there and see the place. I am jazzed to see this place!

"Late" is what you'd expect from a story that appeared in Harpers magzine: Highly neurotic entitled city dweller obsesses about the arrival of his date to the point of insanity. Not my favorite Millhauser piece. Clever, but more than a little tedious.

Back on the Latin again. Having a break (to refresh my German for our trip to Europe last month) actually gave my brain some breathing room to absorb Latin. While I've had to relearn a few words, the "cadence" has come back quickly. Now to get my vocabulary back up to snuff. It likes I might be going back to Europe again next year for work, in which case, I'll toggle back to German again when it's closer.

Having taken a couple of guided tours in Europe last month, Millhauser's "Guided Tour," about a highly accurate historical tour of the town of Hamelin hit close to home. To quote from this macabre tale, "Stories have teeth . . .", and this one will take a chunk out of you. Fabulous, frightening stuff. Here Millhauser leaps from the merely strange into the truly horrific.

No, "After the Beheading" is not some kind of literary click bait. It is one of Millhauser's most morbid tales to date. But the shock doesn't come from the act of the beheading itself. It comes in the slow cessation of outrage and spectacle. The true horror here - and it is truly horrific - arises quietly, long after the execution. It is the slow swelling and expansion of indifferent acceptance.

"One Summer Night" reminds me of the elements I love in Millhauser's fiction: the crystal clear, yet evocative prose, a sense that people are much more or less than they seem, and a liminal state of mind where a certain sinister or magical something is just around the corner, in the shadows, out of reach and that, depending on which side of the razor's edge you fall off of, you might find heaven or hell.