Amy Fusselman

A Novel

The Means

After visiting a playpark in Japan where children are sawing wood, hammering and building open fires, the author reassesses American culture's obsession with overprotection, decides to live a more risk-filled existence and questions the ultimate impact of excessive safety. 15,000 first printing.

A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die

Savage Park

an essay

Idiophone

Poco tiempo después de la muerte de su padre, la narradora de Ocho busca quedar embarazada. Los tratamientos de fertilidad, Angust Young, su experiencia de abuso, los Beastie Boys, el entrenamiento de sueño para bebés y la terapia cráneo sacral conviven con naturalidad en esta gran novela. Amy Fussleman logra abordar lo indecible con una voz que encuentra una veta luminosa tras el duelo y el trauma.

Ocho

The author interweaves excerpts from her father's World War II journal, written when he was a pharmacist's mate on the Liberty ship George E. Pickett, with an account of his death and her own struggle to become pregnant, in a poignant, concise memoir. Reprint.

The Pharmacist's Mate

Idiófono

Il medico della nave-8

In a free form narrative, the author describes events in her life, covering such topics as "her" pedophile, the routine and automatic motions performed every day, and touch therapy.

Eight

Amy Fusselman's first two books, The Pharmacist's Mate and 8, weave surprising beauty out of diverse strands of personal reflection. Half memoir and half philosophical improvisation, each focuses loosely on a relationship with a man in the author's life: The Pharmacist's Mate with her recently deceased father, and 8 with "my pedophile" (as Fusselman painfully refers to her childhood assailant). Along the way, Fusselman covers sea shanties and artificial insemination, World War II and AC/DC, alternative healers and monster-truck videos. Fusselman's "wholly original epigrammatic style" (Vogue) "makes the world strange again, a place where dying and making life are equally mysterious and miraculous activities" (Time Out New York).

The Pharmacist's Mate and 8

“This book, about ballet and beauty, philosophy and family, reinforces Amy Fusselman’s status as one of our best interrogators of how we live now.” —Dave Eggers Leaping from ballet to quilt making, from The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy. “Fusselman bounds with great dexterity from theme to theme—covering topics including addiction, motherhood, gender, and art—until she has transformed the traditional essay into something far wilder and more alive.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “No one acrobats between beauty, confession, rueful humor, and deep insight with such amazing trapeze-y ease as Amy Fusselman.” —John Hodgman

An Essay

"The debut novel from "wholly original" (Vogue) memoirist Amy Fusselman, a tragicomic family saga that skewers contemporary issues of money, motherhood, and class through a well-to-do woman's quest to buy a Hamptons beach house"--

The debut novel from “wholly original” (Vogue) memoirist Amy Fusselman, a tragicomic family saga that skewers contemporary issues of money, motherhood, and class through a well-to-do woman’s quest to buy a Hamptons beach house. Shelly Means, a wealthy stay-at-home mom and disgraced former PTA president, is poised to get the one thing in life she really wants: a beach house in the Hamptons. Who would have guessed that Shelly, the product of frugal Midwesterners, or her husband George, an unrepentant thrift shopper, would ever be living among such swells? But Shelly believes it’s possible. It might be a very small house, and it might be in the least-fancy part of the Hamptons. But Shelly has a vision board, an architect, and a plan. But what should be a simple real estate transaction quickly goes awry as Shelly’s new neighbors disapprove of her proposed shipping container house at the same time that George’s lucrative work as a VoiceOver artist dries up. But Shelly is dogged. She knows how to go into beast mode. But will it ever be enough to realize her beach house dreams? A novel of real estate, ambition, family, and money from “one of our best interrogators of how we live now, and how we should live” (Dave Eggers), The Means is also a fantastical, fast-moving and very funny exploration of class, wealth, and the value of work.

Amy Fusselman

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