Michael Downs, a Hartford native, is the author of House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. A recipient of a literary fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and is an assistant professor of English at Towson University.

Advance Praise for The Greatest Show

"The Greatest Show is a tour de force, a collection of stories that achieves so much more than the sum of its parts. Each story chips away at a shared mystery, and the answers Michael Downs finds are answers for us all, for the questions we ask about how, and why, we survive. Survive and love. This book is going to live with me for a long while, and I can't recommend it highly enough."—Tom Franklin, author of Poachers and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

"Though each story stands alone in scope and power, the larger portrait of a community bound and propelled by fate--specifically, a catastrophic circus fire--is a stellar, magical achievement. The Greatest Show is a fantastically conceived, compelling book."--Sabina Murray, author of The Caprices and Tales of the New World

"As he did in his fine nonfiction, House of Good Hope, Michael Downs has penned a heartbreaking paean to Hartford, an overlooked American city, using its circus fire as a starting point. Having begun his career at the Courant, the author is quickly staking his claim as this capital's William Kennedy."--Stewart O’Nan, author of Emily, Alone and The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy

“Brilliant as individual pieces, these stories when read together are a revelation. The Greatest Show is the work of a mature, compassionate, incisive writer with a talent for discovering strange surprises at the periphery of tragedy.”—Sheri Joseph, author of Stray and Bear Me Safely Over

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