In the Penny Arcade

The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser?s gifts, from ?August Eschenburg?, the story of a clockmaker?s son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to ?Cathay?, a kingdom whose wonders include landscape paintings executed on the bodies of court ladies.