Voices in the Night
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vividly imaginative new collection of 16 stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Millhauser 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.