Little Kingdoms (Vintage Contemporaries)
Overlappings of imagination and reality cast magic through these three vividly conceived novellas exploring the ramifications of artistic creation. In "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," the eponymous hero, a cartoonist for a New York City newspaper in the 1920s, labors in the study of his Mount Hebron home on a "secret, exhilarating project": thousands of numbered ink drawings that will constitute moments of an elaborate animated film. As the world of his art becomes more splendid, the day-to-day reality of his life becomes progressively less rewarding. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" juggles familiar motifs of legend--a beautiful, virtuous princess; a jealous prince; a scheming dwarf; a towering castle and subterranean dungeon--in its tale of a town's self-conscious effort to attach a fanciful, folkloric past to its utilitarian present. "Catalogue of the Exhibition" fashions a biography of fictional 19th-century painter Edmund Moorash and his intimates from a sequential discussion of his exhibited works. Millhauser ( The Barnum Museum ) evokes the impact of non-verbal art with uncommon ease. He develops each of these stories with such narrative precision and well-chosen detail that even his most fanciful and abstract conceits fully engage the reader.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.