In the penny arcade

Blurb

In the Penny Arcade is one of seven short stories written by Steven Millhauser and published in 1986. These seven short stories were previously published in the early 1980s in venues such as the New Yorker, Grand Street, Antaeus, and the Hudson Review. Like Mr. Millhauser's two novels, they are about the ability of artists and children to see things anew, to remake things through the force of their own romantic yearnings, and the dangerous consequences of that gift.
The seven stories were gathered together to form a collection “In the Penny Arcade” and include: August Eschenburg, A Protest Against the Sun, The Sledding Party, A Day in the Country, Snowman, In the Penny Arcade, and Cathay.
“In this story, as in the others, Mr. Millhauser writes with assurance and skill, equally at ease with a variety of literary genres, equally adept at recording the chatty non sequiturs of teen-agers and the dense, metaphysical musings of a 19th-century con man".