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World Fantasy Award winning short story. It originally appeared under the title The Illusionist in Esquire, December 1989. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (1990), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collections The Barnum Museum (1990) and We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011).

A film loosely based on this story, The Illusionist, was released in 2006.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler comes a stunningly original new book set in a Connecticut town over one incredible summer night. The delicious cast of characters includes a band of teenage girls who break into homes and simply leave notes reading "We Are Your Daughters," a young woman who meets a phantom lover on the tree swing in her back yard, a beautiful mannequin who steps down from her department store window, and all the dolls "no longer believed in," left abandoned in the attic, who magically come to life.

With each new book, Steven Millhauser radically stretches not only the limits of fiction but also of his seemingly limitless abilities. Enchanted Night is a remarkable piece of fiction, a compact tale of loneliness and desire that is as hypnotic and rich as the language Millhauser uses to weave it.

The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out."

Table of Contents:

• The Knife Thrower - (1997)
• A Visit - (1997)
• The Sisterhood of Night - (1994)
• The Way Out - (1991)
• Flying Carpets - (1997)
• The New Automaton Theatre - (1998)
• Clair de Lune - (1998)
• The Dream of the Consortium - (1993)
• Balloon Flight, 1870 - (1997)
• Paradise Park - (1993)
• Kaspar Hauser Speaks - (1998)
• Beneath the Cellars of Our Town - (1998)

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Harper's Magazine. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection (1995), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collection The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

From the Pulitzer and Story Prize winner: sixteen new stories--provocative, funny, disturbing, enchanting--that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit.

Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies.

Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream.

Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - Miracle Polish - (2011) - short story
• 20 - Phantoms - (2010) - novelette>
• 45 - Sons and Mothers - (2012) - short story
• 62 - Mermaid Fever - (2009) - short story
• 76 - The Wife and the Thief - short story
• 86 - A Report on Our Recent Troubles - (2007) - short story
• 98 - Coming Soon - (2013) - short story
• 110 - Rapunzel - (2011) - novelette
• 135 - Elsewhere - short story
• 150 - Thirteen Wives - (2013) - short story
• 165 - Arcadia - (2013) - short story
• 183 - The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama - novelette
• 226 - The Place - novelette
• 249 - Home Run - (2013) - short story
• 253 - American Tall Tale - (2012) - short story
• 270 - A Voice in the Night - (2012) - novelette