num_pages: 240
description: The Barnum Museum is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of short stories. Within its pages, note such sights a study of the motives and strategies used by the participants in the game of Clue, including the seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard; the Barnum Museum, a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it; a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman - and loses her to an imaginary man! - and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured.
language: English
title: The Barnum Museum
titlecomplete: The Barnum Museum
genres: Magical Realism, American, Fantasy, Mystery, Anthologies, Short Stories, Short Story Collection, Literature, Literary Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 917
awards: awardedAt: 662716800000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
publisher: Dalkey Archive Press