When I read Millhauser’s latest short story collection, I expressed some reservations. It was suggested that I revisit an earlier collection by Millhauser, which I’ve just finished with this 1990 collection. I had meant to read this one for some time, being a big Millhauser fan anyway. And with the release of the 2006 film The Illusionist, I had even more desire to do so.

The last story in this collection - Eisenheim the Illusionist - is, as good as the film was, a much more interesting take on illusion and reality. In Millhauser’s short story, the ‘crime’ is that Eisenheim dared to blur the line between art and real life, between reality and illusion. The film casts the climax as a much more mundane political tale.

Several other stories collected here were wonderful as well. In The Invention of Robert Herendeen, a lonely and unmotivated though brilliant young man conjures up a companion wholly out of his imagination, but is unable to sustain the reality of the illusion.

Millhauser reinvents and/or reimagines both Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass (inAlice, Falling) and T. S. Eliot’sThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Klassik Komix #1. And what he did for the movie theater cartoon in his latest cillection, he did for the venerable board game Clue in A Game of Clue. I found The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad a little less engaging than these two.

Fantasy and the fantastic never have been my favorite genres, but in the hands of Millhauser, they’re always more than that and invariably rewarding on several levels. ( )

I bought this because it contained the short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist." That story was the best of the lot. For me, the remainder of the stories were unsatisfying. I did enjoy the other stories but, overall, I would not read this book again.

I picked this book up in order to read the award-winning last story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (on which the movie The Illusionist was loosely based) but ended up reading it in its entirety. This collection of short stories is fascinating and imaginative, each in some way exploring the relationship between reality and fantasy. The extraordinary detail in each story is incredible, although at times this can be a downfall and quite distracting from the stories themselves.

Stories included in this volume: A Game of Clue; Behind the Blue Curtain; The Barnum Museum; The Sepia Postcard; The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad; Klassik Komix #1; Rain; Alice, Falling; The Invention of Robert Herendeen; Eisenheim the Illusionist

Experiments in Reading ( )