SOURCE: Green, Daniel. “Two Fabulists.” Georgia Review 49, no. 4 (winter 1995): 960-67.

In the following excerpt, Green finds parallels between Steve Stern's A Plague of Dreamers and Millhauser's Little Kingdoms.

Throughout the recent period in American fiction dominated by various forms of minimalist neorealism, some writers have persisted in the attempt to expand the horizons of fiction through formal experimentation and other non-representational aesthetic strategies. In addition to such first-generation post-modernists as John Barth and Robert Coover, who have persevered if not always flourished under the current dispensation, some younger writers have emerged since the late 1970's whose work resists the reductive practices and mannerisms of the new realism. Such “punk” writers as Kathy Acker and David Foster Wallace most directly challenge the reigning literary conventions, but others have somewhat more quietly continued to develop the traditions of “fabulation and metafiction” described by Robert Scholes in his 1979 book by that...