As fables, Steven Millhauser’s dreamy, elegant stories tend to send the noses of lit snobs twitching heavenward. But few writers today can construct stories that unravel with such consummate fluidity and contain so many unerringly placed images. We recommend “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” for starters: It tracks the vanishing act of a young woman in a small, suburban town and, like so much of Millhauser’s work, reads like a magic trick in prose.