SOURCE: “Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser,” in Salmagundi, No. 92, Fall, 1991, pp. 115-44.

In the following essay, Kinzie comments on elements of both magic realism and horror in the works of Steven Millhauser.

“Sinbad shifts in his seat.” So reads a sentence from a remarkable new story by Steven Millhauser, “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad.”¹ The diction, demeanor, indeed the whole rhetorical and genre “set” of that sentence is peculiar. Sinbad, the quasi-mythic hero of the Thousand and One Nights, the object (as Millhauser points out) of Scheherazade's meticulous suspensions of plot over the abyss of her death-sentence, and finally a meandering and befuddled narrator (of particular interest to our author) who can remember each voyage in greater detail than any text has ever suggested but who can no longer recall the order in which his voyages occurred—this classic wanderer, erotic experimenter, and...