Steven Millhauser's new novel tells the story of a young entrepreneur in late-nineteenth-century New York City whose ambition to make concrete an elusive dream leads to a fabulous creation that houses the imagination itself.

Young Martin Dressler begins his career as a helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top. His visions grow more and more fantastical as he plans his ultimate creation: the Grand Cosmo, in which he attempts to capture the entire world and its dreams. Accompanied on this journey by two sisters - one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner - and as the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder, he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. The Grand Cosmo is his triumph and his undoing, the bold conclusion to this biography of the twentieth-century notion of progress, this mesmerizing journey into the heart of an American dreamer reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion. 

"Mr Millhauser possesses a bountiful imagination, and an ability to catch his perceptions in a bright butterfly net of prose."   -  The New York Times

"Millhauser's characteristic fascination with the material artifacts of the vanished past-and the startling deftness with which he can describe the street, the carnival, the hotel that never existed-marks him as a cultural historian as well as an idiosyncratic fabulist."  -  Publishers Weekly

Steven Millhauser is a recipient of the Lannan Award and has been honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author of Edwin Mullhouse, The Barnum Museum, and Little Kingdoms, among other books, he teaches at Skidmore College.