Bill Meissner, a faculty emeritus at St. Cloud State University in the Department of English, recently published a new novel titled “The Wonders Of The Little World”. It is Meissner’s third novel and 12th book overall.
The novel is a road trip book with unique and memorable characters. It features a crystal ball-reading mother, her precocious 11-year-old daughter and their tightrope-walker husband/father, who left the carnival unexpectedly on a mysterious journey to the California coast.
Meissner has a background in the circus industry, working as a vendor at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the hometown of the Ringling Brothers and their first circus. He also used knowledge from local Central Minnesota fairs like the Benton County Fair and Big Lake Spud Days when writing his novel.
“Bill Meissner is such a beautiful writer; I admire his voice, his eye for detail, and his gentle humor, and ‘The Wonders of the Little World’ might be his best novel yet,” Shannon Olson said, an SCSU faculty emerita in the English department. “I was hooked from page one, and ready to follow Ariel, Estelle, and Tony wherever the road might take them. There’s wonder and magic in these pages.”
Meissner previously taught at SCSU with an emphasis on creative writing, poetry and fiction. He has authored four books of short stories and five books of poems, and he published his first novel “Spirits in the Grass” in 2008, which won the Midwest Book Award. His last novel “Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire” was published in 2022.
Meissner’s new novel “The Wonders Of The Little World” is available now.
