Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
by Steven Millhauser

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
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Book Summary Information

Author: Steven Millhauser
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 0307267563
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Knopf

Book Reviews of Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories

Book Review: Amazing book!
Summary: 4 Stars

This was an amazing book with only only one or two bad stories. I truly believe that reading is about personal taste so stories that I may enjoy you may not and vice-versa. On that note, buy this book either way because I can assure you there will be at least one story you quite love! I have loved all but one tale in this book!

Summary of Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author hailed by The New Yorker as “a virtuoso of waking dreams” comes a dazzling new collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession. In Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser transports us to unknown universes that uncannily resemble our own.

The collection is divided into three parts that fit seamlessly together as a whole. It opens with a bang, as “Cat ’n’ Mouse” reimagines the deadly ritual between cartoon rivals in a comedy of dynamite and anvils—a masterly prologue that sets the stage for the alluring, very grown-up twists that follow.

Part one, “Vanishing Acts,” features stories of risk and escape: a lonely woman disappears without a trace; a high school boy becomes entangled with his best friend’s troubled sister; and a group of teenagers play a treacherous game that pushes them deep into “the kingdom of forbidden things.”

Excess reigns in the vivid, haunting places of Part two’s “Impossible Architectures,” where domes enclose whole cities, and a king’s master miniaturist creates objects so tiny that soon his entire world is invisible.

Finally, “Heretical Histories” presents startling alternatives to the remembered past. “A Precursor of the Cinema” proposes a new, enigmatic form of illusion. And in the astonishing “The Wizard of West Orange” a famous inventor sets out to simulate the sense of touch—but success brings disturbing consequences.

Sensual, mysterious, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey through brilliantly realized labyrinths of mortal pleasures that stretch the boundaries of the ordinary world to their limits—and occasionally beyond.

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