Disruptions Stories

An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday

Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle that is at once instantly recognizable and profoundly unsettling. Disruptions is a collection of provocative, bracingly original new work from a writer at the peak of his form.

STEVEN MILLHAUSER is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novel Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and We Others: New and Selected Stories, winner of The Story Prize in 2011 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has been translated into eighteen languages, and his story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.