SOURCE: Kinzie, Mary. “Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser.” Salmagundi, no. 92 (fall 1991): 115-44.

In the following essay, Kinzie explores the defining characteristics of Millhauser's short fiction and finds parallels between his work and that of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.

“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...