As in a penny arcade, all manner of pretty, frightening and amazing things happen in these stories . . . they are about the ability of artists and children to see things anew, to remake things through the force of their own romantic yearnings, and the dangerous consequence of that gift. . . . Millhauser possesses a bountiful imagination and an ability to catch his perceptions in a bright butterfly net of prose, and these gifts lend these stories a lovely afterlife, colourful and lively, in the reader's mind,." wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times
The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from "August Eschenburg, " the story of the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supercedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay, " a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.
"Love this, love this, love this book, Millhauser is a genius," wrote an enthusiastic online reviewer.
