Reviews

This might very well be my favorite short story collection of all time. More than that, Aerialists is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and emotionally resonant books I have ever read, a poignant collection of stories that are at once heartbreaking and life-affirming but always profoundly human. Debut author Mark Mayer is a genuine revelation. He writes with dizzying insight and uncanny grace, his prose sparkling brilliantly in the light. Like a great ringmaster, he captivates the attention of his audience and shows us the rich weirdness hiding beneath the surface of everyday life. Aerialists subverts expectations, pushes boundaries, and dares to be different, all while whispering of more wonders to come.

Connected through life in the circus, these stories delve into the lonely worlds of misfits and outcasts. While it would be easy to put the freak label on some of these characters, Mayer finds the nuances in their lives that give them humanity. The collection of short stories is dizzyingly fantastical on every single page.

Excellent … Mayer’s characters and settings are various and multifaceted, sometimes linking up to the proposed theme of the work, and sometimes downright undercutting it … Mayer is interested in people whose connections to their friends and family are strained and tenuous, and his stories explore how easily those connections can be repaired or severed. Most of the pieces in Aerialists are tragedies in one way or another, but they always feel genuine, brought on by mistakes and failures of character. Mayer is well aware of how easily things can go wrong, and how precious it is when they go right.

Mayer’s book is set up like a circus [where] what’s scary are the regular people . . . fractured families try[ing] to find a heart in their homes.

Mayer’s skill is unquestionable, and his range is astounding . . . An ambitious collection of short stories that heralds the coming of a new voice in American fiction.

A common bond that these stories share – a very important one – is that they are excellent … each one of these pieces is thorough and thoughtful, presenting complex narratives that defy simple synopsis. Individually, they shine. Taken together, they paint an emotionally impactful picture packed with dark jokes and glimmers of hope … only the jokes can hurt and the glimmers are sometimes extinguished … Mayer has a distinct authorial voice that permeates the work…The characters that populate these pages are challenging and flawed, driven by desire and as subject to poor decision-making as the rest of us … renders the weird mundane and the mundane weird, finding commonality in strangeness while accentuating the bizarreness of the everyday. In that way, it truly does evoke the circus – it’s three rings of the unknown reflecting the personal truths we keep buried within.

Mayer seems to be showing us that he has many disguises as a writer … captures adolescence with authenticity, tenderness, and humor … a strong debut—these are tender and complex stories that are rich in diversity and ambition. I eagerly await Mayer’s next collection, just to see what he does next.

Mark Mayer writes with a humorous, wistful elegance. His stories are singular, as detached and intimate as dreaming.

I’ve been waiting for this book ever since I first read Mark Mayer’s work, and my anticipation was fully justified: Aerialists is one of the best collections I’ve read in years. These stories are bright and muscular, luminous and generous, nimble and funny, tender and surprising at every turn. They march you to the terrifying precipice of human darkness and relationships and longing and dangle you over the edge. They broke my heart, and I am better for the breaking.

There’s a sense of wide-eyed wonderment in these stories that’s truly rare. Mark Mayer may well live in the same world as you and me, but he’s able to see beyond it all somehow, and he finds extraordinary weirdness and beauty everywhere he looks. Aerialists is exquisite and wild at the same time. How often does one read a book like this?

Through this superb collection, Mark Mayer has built a circus of the normal, has somehow infiltrated the ordinary to reveal the freak inside. These classically constructed stories offer scale models of heartbreak and rage—cynicism and doubt and loss writ so small, then deftly magnified, blown up by tenderness. Mayer shapes the mild, the banal, the picturesque, the sweet, then punctures all that with nothing but reality, a sewing needle in the back of the neck, precise, sharp, unexpected; you go down hard, but know the thrill of being taken out by a master.

Of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” one baffled critic wrote that the music always went to the note next to the one you expected. That’s Mark Mayer’s deal: you’re bracing for a punch but he leg-sweeps you; you’re still reeling when his boutonnière squirts you; as you start to laugh it off, you realize the blow is fatal. Like a true impresario, Mayer never lets you get bored, and you leave feeling like you got more than you paid for. In Aerialists’s nine uncanny, perfectly crafted stories, which bring to mind short-form experts like George Saunders and Steven Millhauser, Mark Mayer puts on the greatest show on Earth.

An exhilarating ether of uncommon intelligence inhabits these stories. Mark Mayer writes beauty, writes funny, writes wise, writes awful, writes marvel, writes verve, writes sad. If the emergency exits are everywhere blocked here, even the unbearable incorporates strange uplift, admits fierce grace, and the whole is frequently gusted by truth. This is the real thing: what an exciting debut.

Brilliant and wrenching, Aerialists explores with great care the struggle to love and be loved, to know and be known. Mayer’s worlds unfold with unwavering compassion and vulnerability. The result is revelatory, brimful with the terror and joy of life laid bare.

Aerialists is a work of great imagination. These stories are always in motion, as characters reach for their better selves and touch them only briefly, in singular, exquisite moments rendered in astounding prose. Mark Mayer is wise and big-hearted, a magician of the American sentence. Each story is its own world, inhabited by characters who are painfully, wonderfully real.

A dazzling collection filled with characters who evoke, in their flawed humanity, the strange, sorrowful and ever shimmering world of the circus. Mayer’s bittersweet stories are playful, haunting and wonderfully inventive. Read them and be transported.