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--Martin 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 to the heart of the American dream.

(From the book jacket)