Millhauser would best be classified under the amorphous heading of "magic realism." One major author who is synonymous with this type of fiction is Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories such as "The Babylon Lottery" and "The Library of Babel" mix the fantastical with the banal and everyday in ways that arouse one's imagination and create new discussions surrounding the societies involved and the assumptions that they are based upon. Similarly, Calvino and Nabokov could be considered in this category. Both writers use the methods of this tradition to explore the process of writing and reading, and the creation of meaning from these two processes. Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a very good example of this. An example from another author is Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, in which all of history is at the mercy of rewriting and reconnecting in the...