The latest novel in Overlook s Sewanee Writers Series, a stunning and gritty debut that chronicles a young man s retreat into the darkly glamorous world of the circus.

The dark, seemingly glitzy world of an American travelling circus is the setting for Richard Schmitt s brilliant debut novel, The Aerialist. On the edge of the dreary town of Venice, Florida, lie the winterquarters a circus in repose. One day Gary who hasn t cared much what sort of job he s had finds himself signing on as a circus hand. Everyone has seen or heard of the wirewalker, the trapeze artist, and the clown, but there are others: The twenty-four-hour man who arrives in a town first to post arrows that point the way to the lot; the bullhands who remove the elephants excrement out from under their tumultuous bodies; the butchers who distract the audience from the wonders on stage so that they might purchase a cotton candy or a plastic ray-gun; the animal people who tend to the animals and keep to themselves. Gary becomes instantly familiar with this new life riding in the circus train from one town to the next in the odd hours of the night. It is a life for which he has abandoned everything and nothing at all.

In story-like chapters, Richard Schmitt describes a hapless, magical existence in an American voice as starkly resonant as that of Richard Ford and through his description of Gary s inevitable progression from circus hand to wirewalker, the circus emerges as a symbol of human aspiration.

Richard Schmitt s stories have appeared in Mississippi Review, The Marlboro Review, Flyway, Puerto del Sol, and Flying Horse Magazine. The Aerialist is his first novel. He lives on a horse farm in Central Florida with his wife.