"No one alive writes better about yearning and heartbreak. . . . Before such mastery, a reader can do nothing but bow his head." --
The Washington Post Book World "Millhauser . . . uses his lush prose and archetypal motifs to trace the outer arcs of passion, places where eros and violence meet. . . . This writer is in love with a large, very beautiful tiger, and at its best the fiction he produces is an exquisite negotiation with the beast." --
The New York Times Book Review "[Millhauser] seeks always to spellbind rather than merely to entertain . . . . He never fumbles a word out of place, never lets fall an unfelicitous phrase, and especially never looks down during his high-wire imaginative act." -
San Francisco Chronicle "In a mere 80 pages or so, [Millhauser] can whistle up worlds as bright and intricate as a Mozart piano sonata or as ominous and ethereal as a Charles Ives symphony . . . powerful, spellbinding reading." --
The Seattle Times "An ingenious geometer of love triangles, Millhauser tinkers with tested formulas in these three novellas, while giving full rein to his taste for the fantastical. . . . [His] shrewd sense of psychology makes his characters' impulses toward romantic excess manifestly believable." -
The New Yorker
"Coursing through these novellas are such literary ghosts as Byron, Wagner-as-librettist, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
. . . But when Millhauser is plumbing the mysteries of the human heart, there's no question that he is writing after, not before, Sigmund Freud-and Kate Chopin, and John Updike and the sexual revolution. . . .
The King in the Tree is a moving, melancholy book about the unlovely toll exacted by love on those it has abandoned." -
Los Angeles Times "Ever finish a book that was so good you ached to grab the collar of the next passer-by and shout in his unsuspecting face, 'Read this! You have got to read this!'? Steven Millhauser writes that kind of book." -
San Diego Union Tribune "Among [Millhauser's] best. . . .
The King in the Tree is a flawless retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult. . . . Astonishingly, Millhauser creates a version that though modern reads like a newly discovered medieval tale. . . . His story will live with the older versions, and Richard Wagner's, as part of the myth." -
Boston Globe "Reading a book by Steven Millhauser is like tumbling down Alice's rabbit hole. In the Millhauser Wonderland, time reels backward, life is but a fairy tale, and figures of mythology rule the universe. . . . All three of the novellas that make up
The King in the Tree inhabit eerie realms of the imagination. Here men and women yearn for love, but it's a poison more often than a tonic." -
Newsday "These three tales, each in different ways, confirm Millhauser's reputation as a master stylist." -
Newark Sunday Star-Ledger "Millhauser is our most brilliant practicing romantic, for whom surface reality is merely an uninteresting illusion, and ultimate reality is always artifice." -
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "All three of the novellas have Millhauser's gifted storytelling voice going for them-a voice that grabs the reader by the ear and makes him pay attention." -
Rocky Mountain News "Millhauser's characters are poignantly likable. They hurt, long and love like the rest of us. . . . Sentence by sentence, Millhauser displays awesome control." -
Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Millhauser's three novellas are marvels of craftmanship and inventiveness . . . a storytelling
tour de force and an emotional rollercoaster ride." -
Richmond Times-Dispatch
