Steven Millhauser

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, to read from his new story collection at Rensselaer (RPI)

NYS Writers Institute, Wednesday, April13, 2016
8:00 p.m. Reading and McKinney Writing Contest Awards | Biotech Auditorium, Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Building, Rensselaer, (RPI), Troy

EVENT DETAILS:
Steven Millhauser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler, will read from his new story collection, Voices in the Night, on Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 8:00 p.m. in the Biotech Auditorium, Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Building, Rensselaer (RPI), Troy. The event is free and open to the public, and is cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with Rensselaer’s Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading.

PROFILE
Steven Millhauser is the author of four novels and nine short fiction collections. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, a story of a Gilded Age American entrepreneur, his dreams, and his failures. Kirkus described the book as “A chronicle of obsession, self-indulgence, and, in a curious way, moral growth, expertly poised between realistic narrative and allegorical fable, …. A fascinating and provocative portrayal of turn-of-the century America that hums with energy and wit.”

Millhauser’s most recent publication is Voices in the Night (2015) a collection of sixteen stories. In a starred review Kirkus described the collection as “A superb testament to America’s quirkiest short story writer, still on his game.” The New York Times Book Review called it “spellbinding, masterly, sublime…Millhauser gives us worlds upon worlds – wistful and warped, comic and chilling – that by story’s end feel as intimate as our own reflections.” The San Francisco Chronicle said “Millhauser’s stories feel as if they’d been composed in a distant era, magically delivered from the past to mystify and delight.”

Reviewers praised Millhauser’s first novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943 – 1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), a fictitious biography of an eleven-year-old novelist, written by his twelve-year-old companion. The New York Times Book Review called the book “a rare and carefully evoked novel,… [that] displays an enviable amount of craft….” In a review for the Washington Post Book World, William Kennedy said the book, “written in immaculate prose, is a prodigious feat of memory, with an enormous density of felt and observed life.” The novel received the French literary award, Prix Médicis Etranger.

Other work by Millhauser includes the novels From the Realm of Morpheus (1986), and Portrait of a Romantic (1977), and the short fiction collections We Others (2011), which received The Story Prize; Dangerous Laughter (2008); The King in the Tree (2003); and Enchanted Night (1999). His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was adapted for film as THE ILLUSIONIST (2006), starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti.

Millhauser also received the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters award for literature in 1987 and the Lannan literary award for fiction in 1994. He is a professor of English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs.

Millhauser’s appearance is cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with Rensselaer’s Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading.

Previous Visit: September 25, 1997

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.