Step Right Up Stories of Carnivals,

Everyone loves a carnival, whether it's the Big Top or a traveling midway kicking up dust. These roving extravaganzas are as amusing as they are mysterious and as innocent as they are sordid. Step Right Up is a one-of-a-kind anthology that collects the finest literature and the most absorbing first-person accounts about carnivals, sideshows, and the circus, capturing all of the spectacle and sensation of this unusual and treasured tradition. A colorful assortment of characters populate the fairgrounds and circus tents of this unique collection from circus legends like P. T. Barnum and Otis Jordan the Frog Prince to a motley crew of ride monkeys and rubes. Step Right Up takes the reader everywhere from a small village in Romania to the streets of Coney Island and offers everything from Fred Rosen's account of the scandalous demise of Grady "Lobster Boy" Stiles Jr. to imaginative fiction like Michael Chabon's macabre take on the origin of clowns. The bizarre romance and mystery of the world's oldest and oddest traveling institution come to life in selections from Katherine Dunn, Kevin Baker, Jim Tully, Flannery O'Connor, Lee Durkee, Robert Hough, Michael Chabon, Fred Rosen, Susan Dickinson, Joseph Michell, Edora Welty, and Ellen Hunnicut.

Nathaniel Knaebel grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from Oberlin College in 1999. He is an assistant editor at the Avalon Publishing Group and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Introduction
Circus music : for clowns, lions, and solo trapeze	p. 1
from Something wicked this way comes	p. 13
from Suite for calliope	p. 33
Carny	p. 47
from The adventures of Huckleberry Finn	p. 73
The frog prince	p. 79
Lady Olga	p. 91
The passing of Philomena Marker	p. 109
from Greek love	p. 121
from Lobster boy	p. 133
from Nights at the circus	p. 171
First sorrow	p. 183
The knife thrower	p. 187
With folded hands forever	p. 199
from Dreamland	p. 205
Boredom	p. 219
The big ferris wheel	p. 234
from Carnival	p. 239
Keela, the outcast Indian maiden	p. 245
A temple of the Holy Ghost	p. 255
The circus eighty years ago : the wages of sin is death	p. 269
from The final confession of Mabel Stark	p. 275
The great showman dead	p. 291
Where blue is blue	p. 309
Epilogue	p. 323
Permissions	p. 325
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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Step Right Up Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials