Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories

These short stories are captivating and fantastic. They compel the reader to consider the the relationship between absurdity and reality. Great food for thought.

Millhauser's short stories transform what start out as thought experiments into dream states where the ordinary world is entirely present and yet utterly destabilized. Everything solid melts into air. You sometimes aren't sure if you're reading or dreaming, but it's all done so skillfully that you never feel as if he's showing off or conjuring for conjuring's sake. Each story reads like a report from branch office, written by Borges. Millhauser is only true peer of Murakami.

I really enjoyed Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser. Each story was powerful and fascinating. After each story I had to stop and savor what I had just read. This is a book I will read again and again. Highly recommended.

Very rarely do I find a short story collection in which I like every story, but this is one such collection. Divided into three sections with four stories each, and adding an introductory tale to make a baker's dozen, this collection holds together better than any I can remember reading. This is even more amazing considering these previously published stories first appeared separately in various literary periodicals. Each story takes a simple idea which could be described in a short paragraph and pulls the string to look at consequences or look beneath the surface of events. Shared themes and ideas, such as the dangers of obsession or the human tendency to pursue transient fads, provide connecting threads that bind the stories together into a unified whole. Different narrative techniques are used. "The Wizard of West Orange" is written as the diary of the librarian at Thomas Edison's laboratory who gets to be the human "guinea pig" in testing a new invention. "History of a disturbance" is written as a somewhat apologetic letter from a husband to his wife explaining why he has felt compelled to take a vow of silence despite the consequent strains it has placed on their marriage. Other stories are written in first person, third person, or omniscient narrator, providing a variety of narrative styles. Overall, the best short story collection I have read in a long time, and I'm not surprised to see it on many critics' "Best of 2008" list.

Bizarre, profound, and gorgeously written, the thirteen stories in Steven Millhauser's collection will transport the reader to a world that is strikingly similar to our own, but where impossibly strange things are dangerously possible. A lonely, ignored woman literally vanishes into thin air after preparing a cup of tea one night. In the titular story, a group of teenagers experiment with laughter as a potentially deadly new drug whose high they cannot resist. A miniaturist becomes obsessed with creating invisible, pristine pieces of art. A tower rises higher and higher into the sky until it finally pierces Heaven itself. A historical society courts controversy by obsessively recording the details of the present (or, as they refer to it, the New Past). In each installment Millhauser skirts the line between fantastic and mundane, sane and insane, to create a collection rich in depth and profundity. "A book is a dream machine. Its purpose is to take you out of the world." If this was indeed Millhauser's intent, he succeeded with aplomb. Each story is grounded in the real world's sensibilities, but Millhauser's wild imagination and prose style weave in just the right amount of oddness. I can see that for some, his quirks and outlandish twists could be seen as irksome, but I found myself enthralled with every story and each new take on his themes. "For we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearances." If the stories in the collection's last segment, "Heretical Histories," are a touch weaker than the rest, they still stand head and shoulders above the majority of other offerings in the fiction section this year. The stories in "Dangerous Laughter" are a towering achievement, and Millhauser pulls them off with panache - making this very likely the best new book of 2008. Also recommended: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Garden of Last Days: A Novel, and Purple America: A Novel. Grade: A