Стивен Миллхаузер: Little Kingdoms

Cartoons that draw their creator into another world, demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to such marvelous — and often disquieting — effect in Little Kingdoms, a collection whose three novellas suggest magical companion pieces to his acclaimed longer fictions.

In «The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne,» a gentle eccentric constructs an elaborate alternate universe that is all the more appealing for being transparently unreal. «The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon» is at once a gothic tale of nightmarish jealousy and a meditation on the human need for exaltation and horror. And «Catalogue of the Exhibition» introduces us to the oeuvre of Edmund Moorash, a Romantic painter who might have been imagined by Nabokov or Poe. Exuberantly inventive, as mysterious as dreams, these novellas will delight, mesmerize, and transport anyone who reads them.