Aerialists: Stories

"Mark Mayer writes with a humorous, wistful elegance. His stories are singular, as detached and intimate as dreaming." —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead
Drawing inspiration from the circus, this bittersweet and tender collection features lonely misfits yearning for connection in a world gone slightly askew. A young boy attempting to navigate his parents' divorce finds a mentor in his mother's new best friend, a tough-talking female bodybuilder. A retired circus elephant dies, inspiring his devoted caretaker to arrange a suitable funeral, with inadvertently ghoulish results. A Navy recruit grapples with the impending loss of his childhood and girlfriend by building an exact replica of his neighborhood in code. From a telepathic deaf-mute teen at the mall to a basement-dwelling, revolution-plotting Jewish Communist in Denver, Mayer's stories illuminate the lives of small scale American spectaculars, rendering their attempted acts of daring and feats of strength with humor, generosity, and uncommon grace.
Mark Mayer's debut collection, Aerialists, won the Michener Copernicus Prize. Individual stories have appeared in Colorado Review, MidAmerican Review, and New Stories from the Midwest. From 2012 to 2014, he lived at Cornell College's Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer. Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and won the Prairie Lights Prize for both fiction and poetry. He is a current PhD candidate at the University of Denver.