Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief

Mandy Keifetz

An ebook exclusive.

After Izzy’s lover Tim, an entomologist and ringmaster of a flea circus, makes an Irish exit out the airshaft window, she oscillates between madness and reason, failing to make any sense of it. 

Staggering from the gut punch, she serves the drunks at Tim’s brother’s dockside bar, takes up with a purveyor of flea-breeding equipment who asks no questions, and slowly loses her grip. Every time she reaches for cold certainties, her mind skids off the road. Izzy can calculate the inexorable physics of falling and catalog the world into facts, but no matter what, every time, she hits the wall. She still can’t make logic out of loss.

Driven by inevitability, a hot car, and an alphabet that doesn’t quite end, what Izzy wants to know is, do you die of grief or do you kill it first?

PRAISE FOR FLEA CIRCUS

“Keifetz's second novel, the winner of the 2010 AWP Award, simply dazzles… The novel takes the reader to the dark place where reason and love collide and collapse under the oppressive weight of loss. A tour de force.” —Kirkus Review

“The experience of Keifetz's second novel (after Corrido) is less like reading a book than having a frighteningly intimate conversation over coffee. A must for fans of literary fiction.” —Library Journal

“A spellbinding story of bereavement… Keifetz creates a narrator whose whip-smart narration—sex-drenched, hilarious, and full of wordplay—is anything but a downer.” —Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist

“Flea Circus is a remarkable book. This is a fearless, deeply original, and wholly moving book, finely written and exquisitely devastating. Mandy Keifetz is a writer of unusual talent and depth.” —Emily St. John Mandel

"I was drawn to the sheer strangeness of the writer's project: the lyrical, tough-talking high-low lament of a Jersey Girl who cannot, who will not, and who essentially luxuriates in her refusal to get over the suicide of her lover. A simultaneously reckless and calculated intensity permeates this novel… But for me the real surprises were less about letters than about voice, about sentences and about the paragraphs that nearly always ended in a different place (and more interestingly) than I might have predicted.” —Francine Prose