Book Review: The Barnum Museum

One of the great things about vacation is the time to read for fun. Steven Millhauser's The Barnum Museum is a collection of short stories, and I really enjoyed two in particular. The title story, "The Barnum Museum", is a story about a location that treads the quiet line between the real and the fantastical. This museum carries an air of mystique, and the atmosphere Millhauser creates is truly magical. The last story of the collection, "Eisenheim the Illusionist", is an amazing story, now made into a movie (The Illusionist 2006) about a magician during turn-of-the-19th century Vienna whose magic tricks take on more and more wondrous feats. In any case, I highly recommend those two stories for anyone who likes fiction that encroaches the border of magic realism.

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