The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser¿s gifts, from ¿August Eschenburg¿, the story of a clockmaker¿s son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to ¿Cathay¿, a kingdom whose wonders include landscape paintings executed on the bodies of court ladies.