Disruptions
Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
AN NPR AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday
Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle that is at once instantly recognizable and profoundly unsettling. Disruptions is a collection of provocative, bracingly original new work from a writer at the peak of his form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Millhauser's accomplished collection (after Voices in the Night) is a mélange of fantastical imaginings and scenes of domestic oddness. In "The Summer of Ladders," one of several stories that grapple with suburban groupthink, Millhauser exhibits a Cheeveresque curiosity about—and a fun house distortion of—a small town's placid facade ("This efflorescence of ladders was probably no more than one of those common accidents of town life, like the sudden appearance of basketball nets on all the garages of a random stretch of block," the narrator tells himself, before recognizing with a hint of ominousness that "the ladders were growing taller"). "The Column Dwellers of Our Town" features a community full of modern-day stylites—people who chose a solitary life of asceticism atop a column, not unlike the Christian saints of late antiquity. Millhauser excels at scenes of strange encounters, as in "One Summer Night," about a 16-year-old boy who unexpectedly spends an evening with his girlfriend's mother—who tells him she's in a "moon mood" and asks to be pushed on a swing. The fabulist efforts also pay off, as in "The Little People," where normal-sized humans coexist with a group of much smaller counterparts. This will please Millhauser's longtime fans and earn him new admirers.
