I haven't read this one, but the sample reads promisingly enough that I think I'm going to buy it while it's still on sale, and the author has brief but respectable print credentials and has works out from quality small sf/fantasy specialty presses.
Circus of the Grand Design by Robert Freeman Wexler (
ISFDB entry) is apparently one of his "surrealist" literary-type fantasy works, as Wikipedia describes his style. I found this while trawling the Read an E-Book Week Smashwords sale, and it's
25% off the regular $2.99 through March 10th, and the re-publisher is fellow MR member author & editor Keith Brooke via his Infinity Plus imprint (this was originally released by Prime Books in 2004 according to ISFDB).
When Lewis rents a vacation house on Long Island he doesn’t expect to end up on a crazy circus train ride to nowhere. Travelling through strange and wonderful lands, he becomes lost amongst mad acrobats, sexy elephant riders, a magical mechanical horse, a giant woman and her savage, prehistoric rodent bears, an egotistical juggler, and...a fertility goddess who takes exceptional interest in him.
The longer descriptive blurb @ SW quotes specific praise from Howard Waldrop, Publisher's Weekly, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Locus Magazine among others, and there's a Ray Bradbury comparison in the tags and the Booklist quote.
ETA: The author has also written a short entitled
The Adventures of Philip Schuyler and the Dapper Marrionette in the City of the Limbless Octopi. Okay, I'm definitely buying his novel, if only because he's clearly got imagination and also to encourage releasing a Smashwords-available collection of his shorts if he's got more like that.