Animal tamer Captain Jack Bonavita sitting down with some of his cats, at Coney Island in 1904.

In my short novel Circus, lion tamer Carl Ellenbeck affects Bonavita’s sang froid, but is secretly terrified that his big cats will discover how terrified he is of them, at which point he knows they would immediately tear him to pieces.

Bonavita was utterly fearless, and once appeared in a cage with 27 lions.  In 1904, a lion he was performing with attacked him and mangled his arm, which eventually had to be amputated.  He continued performing, however, until he was killed in 1917 by a polar bear he was training.

With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .

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At the heart of my short novel Circus are two young women, Beth and Anne, The Kelly Twins. They are trapeze artists, brilliant and beautiful. One of them is bitter and malicious, one of them is saintly — but when they fly together, they seem to share a single mind, a single heart, even a single soul.

No one who knows them only on the ground knows them at all, and the adoring men who watch them from the sawdust below, flying together, fall in love with a great mystery.

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