American writer Stephen Millhauser was born in 1943. His first novel, Geoffrey Cargright. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, published in 1972, was awarded the French Prize for Best Foreign Work and brought instant fame to the author. Since 1972, Millhauser has published three more novels, the last of which, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Stephen Millhauser is a set singer and enumerator. A writer who, from a million little things, ordinary and not so ordinary, with the help of a familiar image - a supermarket, an amusement park or a labyrinth - creates a small world, a microuniverse. It seems to live its inanimate life, but only as long as there are people in it, the meaning of whose existence is to stay in it. A writer who devotes all the power of his talent to ensure that the reader again immerses himself, or at least touches with the tips of his adult soul, the lost atmosphere of adolescence and youth. All the heroes of his stories are constantly in or enter a state of surprise, curiosity, discovery and revelation. In these stories, EVERYTHING seems to be ordinary and if it doesn’t exist, then it could well be, and suddenly - click! – something intimate and psychologically vivid is revealed to us. The American college teacher writes deep and, at the same time, comfortable prose, which is so good to read on a warm August evening. We sit on the verandas, in old creaky rocking chairs, on a wooden table at a distance there is a basket of ripe pears, and in our souls there is a slight sadness from a short separation from a loved one. And there is no hurry. Only the lazy did not notice the references in “The Knife Thrower” to the aesthetics, thoughts and styles of many, now dead, great writers. Many of those who are not lazy, happy from recognizing quotes and metaphors (the guessing game!), blame Millhauser for being secondary. They don’t feel the magic, the magical atmosphere at all.... Millhauser’s play with the legacy of Franz Kafka is interesting. The second story in the collection, “We Met,” provides a thread to Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis.” Only with Millhauser everything turns out with the opposite sign: surrealistically moist love for the frog (“We Met”) versus rejection and hatred for the “insect” (“Metamorphosis”). The second bow to Kafka is the story “Exit”, paralleled with the famous hopeless “The Trial”. The emergence of associations is a purely personal process; while reading, for various reasons, I was reminded of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradberry, “The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse, BorgesBorgesBorges and even the famous quest “Syberia” (the most magnificent story in the collection "New Mechanical Puppet Theater"). But in general, the book is very and forever worthy of taking its place on the shelf in the central halls of the library universe. Although where does she get such halls, she is endless... (