LITTLE KINGDOMS — Steven Millhauser

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler delivers an inventive collection of three novellas that are a magical companion to his acclaimed longer fictions. • "Millhauser makes our world turn amazing!" -- The New York Times Book Review

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.

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.