I grew up in featureless suburbia, where the streets of identical bungalows seemed scrubbed of anything miraculous. Maybe that’s why I came to be fascinated, as a kid, with the idea of tiny things. Here was magic that might exist in my backyard: miniature people trooping through lawns as if they were forests, riding ladybugs, and carrying bramblethorn spears! These daydreams formed some of the first stories I wrote, as a child. And they’ve continued to fascinate me as a reader, and a writer, ever since. I’ve tried to pick stories that might have slipped out of sight amongst ‘bigger’ brethren like The Burrowersand Gulliver’s Travels. I hope you enjoy them!
A Tom Thumb-type fable, and the first story about the miniature that I remember being enthralled by. Anton B. Stanton sails a castle moat like it’s a sea, and gets captured by Pirats (I didn’t get the lame pun until I was a grown-up and buying the book for my own son). It was the first book that held out the promise of tiny, miraculous adventures happening right under my nose.
A boy no bigger than a tea cup is forced to walk the plank by his rat captors and then returns to their pirate ship to free the kidnapped water rat princess.
Stephen Millhauser writes so elegantly. He’s also one of the smartest writers on the miniature that I’ve come across. He doesn’t just use tiny things to delight and enthrall us but interrogates why we find the miniature so compelling. It’s fitting that his best work is to be found in short story form, where he crafts fiendishly complex tales of obsessed miniature makers, like in “The New Automaton Theatre.” This intriguing example, told in (I think) first-person plural perspective, is a fictional history of ‘automaton theatre’ that speculates not just on our fascination with the miniature, but with imitative art itself.
Included in this short story collection is "The Sisterhood of the Night", now a major motion picture. From the bestselling author of Martin Dressler, this volume explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them.
With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage…
Mood swings and insomnia are one thing, hot flash-induced psychic visions are quite another. When Olivia Wilde realizes the visions she’s experiencing in the midst of hot flashes are actually premonitions, she must learn to understand and trust what she sees in order to help a friend, preserve a piece…
In the short story “Battleground”, a hitman finds himself under siege in his own apartment by an army of toy soldiers. It’s typical concept-on-a-napkin by Stephen King, and typically compulsive storytelling, too. I’ve got a special reverence for writers who can tackle silly narratives with the utmost conviction (it’s what I try to do myself!), and I just loved the ever-escalating madness here. The final twist will have you grinning, guaranteed.
Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, originally published in 1978, showcases the darkest depths of his brilliant imagination and will "chill the cockles of many a heart" (Chicago Tribune). Night Shift is the inspiration for over a dozen acclaimed horror movies and television series, including Children of the Corn , Chapelwaite, and Lawnmower Man.
Here we see mutated rats gone bad (“Graveyard Shift”); a cataclysmic virus that threatens humanity (“Night Surf,” the basis for The Stand); a possessed, evil lawnmower (“The Lawnmower Man”); unsettling children from the heartland (“Children of the Corn”); a smoker who will try anything to…
I just don’t know why this book isn’t talked about more. It’s so brooding and brilliant and horrifying. Heavily influenced by Philip Pullman’s masterful Clockwork (there’s sinister automata, and creepy clockmakers, and a snow-bound Germanic feel), it contains one of the most awful and terrifying antagonists in all of children’s literature. Nasty and enchanting — the very darkest and grimmest of tales.
What good is a toy that will wind down? What if you could give a toy a heart? A real heart. One that beat and beat and didn't stop. What couldn't you do if you could make a toy like that?
From the moment that the circus boy, Mathias, takes a small roll of paper from the dying conjuror, his fate is sealed. For on it is the key to a terrifying secret, and there are those who would kill him rather than have it told.
Pursued by the sinister Dr. Leiter with his exquisite doll and malevolent dwarf, preyed…
Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care…
As a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m always on the lookout for writing prompts, which is how I came to own this gorgeous photography book of the Nutshell Studies: eighteen dollhouse dioramas produced by Frances Glessner Lee, a master criminal investigator in the 1940s, for the purpose of training in forensics. The images are captivating as much as they are disturbing, and represent a rare but perfect marriage of the realms of the miniature and criminal deduction. In his essay on the subject, Stephen Millhauser writes that ‘the miniature holds out the promise of total revelation.’ In Glessner Lee’s dioramas of tawdry and violent death, we feel the accompanying prospect of a solution to these crimes, tantalisingly hidden in the smallest of details. All we have to do to perceive it, is look closer; and closer; and more closer still.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death offers readers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator. Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy grandmother, founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the…
Her name is Lily. She is a girl three inches tall, her clothes stitched from spider-silk, her eyes like dewdrops. For half her life, she’s been imprisoned in a gilded birdcage by the giant Gulliver. Only dimly does she remember the island that was home, where everything was small.
Gulliver intends to show her to London, just as soon as he finishes the book of his travels. But Lily doesn’t have time to wait around. Time passes for small folk faster than it does for big ones. She has to get away, before it’s too late. She has to go home to Lilliput.
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse…
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
