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.

The surreal or carnivalesque is refreshing in Mayer’s writing; the fantastic and the ridiculous are handled with measured sentences and clear, unexaggerated prose. The quality of the stories’ structure is what one has come to expect of Iowa Writers’ Workshop grads: The pacing never drags, and the narratives turn neatly, usually without sacrificing surprise ... Aerialists is not particularly quotable, for better or for worse. It is, rather, Mayer’s carnival of characters that I find myself carrying around in my head ... Within this poignant blend of knowledge and ignorance, Mayer’s portrayal of childhood becomes exquisite ... Only on occasion do characters fail to realize a story’s potential ... Still, Aerialists is full of weird, singular stories articulated in bracing and unusually disciplined prose. Mark Mayer’s carnival of oddities is worth the price of admission and, like the model train’s banner car, leads one to believe that more delights lay in store.

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; too often, collections like this one feel too uniform in their sound. That’s far from the case here – even the stories that seems as though there might be overlap are distinct. 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 renders the cast in all its complexity. He presents common wonders and everyday magic like the 'iridescent pink storm on a bowling ball' ' while also parading a menagerie of the tragic ... An emotionally complex, crowd-pleasing circus is not a simple show to put on, yet through a series of short story acts this collection does just that ... details fit naturally in the work, offering us a deeper glimpse of the characters or their situation. They are present, but function as organic icons that don’t draw too much attention and thereby imbue the stories with a bonus layer of depth ... In contrast, the language and gesturing toward meaning in a story like 'The Evasive Magnolio' at times feels forced ... Where Mayer is at his best is when he distracts you from his skill and the weight of his stories with the sleight of hand of humor and lightness ... Despite the poverty and divorce and dead elephants and murder clowns, the America portrayed here is not a simple, nasty, broken place. It’s a land where there’s still the surprisingly optimistic possibility of arriving at unity and light.

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.

... impressive ... While these nine stories are held together by themes of loneliness, the tone, voice, and pacing are remarkably disparate ... The stories that focus in on one time and place are more successful ... 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.

Quirky, intricate stories ... Mayer’s skill is unquestionable, and his range is astounding; he can render absurdist parables about the internet right next to historical fiction about the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union during the fall of the Iron Curtain. His strength lies in his subtle realist mode, when his focus on the inner lives of his characters allows the unconventionality of his style and his narrative decision-making to shine through. Stories written in Mayer’s surrealist mode sometimes feel so self-referential and lost in their own calculus that they don’t come together as well. Mayer’s prose is so compressed and exact that its dedication to strangeness sometimes undercuts the story it is telling, but historical frameworks provide Mayer with enough structure to make the twists and turns of his writing additive where elsewhere they subtracted from the tale. Unfortunately, the collection’s dedication to having the stories cohere around the circus theme feels forced and coerces the stories in a direction they wouldn’t have otherwise gone—their thematic interconnectedness is too often a stretch. In the end, Mayer’s debut effort is a somewhat flawed but memorable book ... An ambitious collection of short stories that heralds the coming of a new voice in American fiction.

Mayer wittily subverts reader expectations with stories told in a realistic manner about characters or situations that all share a slightly surreal bent, resulting in a clever collection.