The fantasy stories in here, most notably the title story and the final story about the magician, are astoundingly good. Wow. There are also a few others in here that are nice, which also have fantasy/magical realism elements. But there are quite a few that feel like filler. He has this old-fashioned style of writing that goes really well with fantasy, but when applied to more realistic fare, becomes tedious. Overall, though, if you can, say, check it out of the library, it's worth it, just to read those two stories -- especially if you liked The Night Circus, or Carter Beats the Devil, both of which fall into that sort of genre.

Like being swept along by a waterfall of many cascades. The fascination and satisfaction of passing from one room to the next. There is lucid discovery in each of the stories. Their slightly faded or broken or antique art direction adds weight and mystery to ordinary objects, like someone opening the attic of their deep past to ask the myth of their own origin.

VERY compelling, sympathetic.

I hate when reviewers pick out favorite stories -- I feel it skews one's own reading. That said, 'Alice Falling' is a dynamic tumbling, a perpetually unfolding origami, its paper printed on three or four sides.

DO read this!

Not Millhauser's best work. While credit should be given to him for practically inventing literary Steampunk, his stories often metastasize into sprawling, overwritten inventories of minutiae in service to god-knows-what. The first story in the book is 60 PAGES when it should have been 20, tops. While I'm not a fan of characters just sitting around talking about their feelings, and Millhauser certainly knows how to create atmosphere, he tends to revisit the same territory to the point of predictability: Endless rhetorical questions are asked of the reader, there's bound to be a "warren of hidden rooms," architecture is described ad nauseum, weird sexual repressions rooted in childhood ...

And not to sound like a MFA creative writing workshop millennial malcontent working undercover for the PC Police, but I don't think I've ever seen a single person of color in any of this stories. I could be wrong about this--I guess Sinbad counts--but even that story has all kinds of painfully clunky allusions to apes and primitive cultures. Millhauser rarely employs dialogue and when he does, characters pontificate pretentiously as their onstage. One of the stories, "Klassik Komix #1," is sectioned into panels--but the the story itself really offers nothing at all other than the (literal) framing device. Not to snark, but Robert Coover, Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson do this sort of thing much better and more concisely. Millhauser doesn't get out of the house much, I would guess. His writing often feels closed-off and 2-dimensional when a short story needs to have 3 or 4 dimensions--something beyond clever conceptualization racking up a high word count.

I still love Millhauser. Stories like "The Dome," "In the Reign of Harad IV," "A Visit" and "Eisenheim the Illusionist" are masterpieces. And this is a very early collection of his (1990)--so one must bear that in mind. His more recent stories are, IMHO, better.

This is a strange collection of tales some of which I enjoyed, some of which I didn't. I loved The Sepia Postcard and Eisenheim the Illusionist, both of which I found very well written and inventive with just enough hints at reality to suck the reader in and keep you thoroughly engrossed from start to finish. The remaining tales were a little odd and I found I just couldn't get into them that much, particularly the first story, A Game of Clue, I just didn't see the purpose of that at all. Rain I found strangely interesting yet it still somehow left me a little underwhelmed by the end but I can't put my finger on why. Overall this is an interesting collection with something for everyone but will 'in fill' stories that don't quite do the job.

I liked the first story, about the board game Clue and the last, about a Viennese magician, which is the basis of the film The Illusionist, and which MD might like. The rest didn't really do too much for me.

I would have given this 1 Star, but I really liked the last story in this collection.

Millhauser focuses too much attention on detail rather than plot, so much so that trying to power through most of these stories quickly became exhausting.

I could not complete this book, and it took six months of trying to get through it to get to that point. Im' sorry, but the writing was not engaging and the stories were unwelcoming to the reader.

I only read Eisenheim the Illusionist. What a great story.