SOURCE: LaHood, Marvin J. Review of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, by Steven Millhauser. World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 148-49.

In the following review, LaHood elucidates the disparity between Millhauser's short stories and realistic fiction.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Steven Millhauser (in 1996 for Martin Dressler) is a skillful writer; it seems as if he is capable of picking just the right word every time, putting them in sequences that mesmerize and fascinate. The worlds he creates are fantastic realms of magic carpets, amusement parks almost beyond our imagination, and department stores of dizzying complexity. The world he doesn't create is a world reflective of the one we live in, that world that has served the great writers so well. And although it is probably unfair to ask him to do something he does not intend to do, his fiction raises some serious fin-de-siècle questions. He has an...