We’re super excited to share that our June Book Club selection is Amy Fusselman’s Idiophone, forthcoming from Coffee House Press on July 3, 2018, but available to Book Club members in just a few weeks!
Leaping from ballet to quilt-making, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and an 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. Amy Fusselman is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, and lives in Manhattan with her husband and three children.
Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments, writes:
One of Fusselman’s great talents has always been the construction of juxtapositions and equivalencies, and in this book, she doesn’t disappoint: a mother is a small iridescent paper circle, an EMT is a baby bunny, alcoholism and maternal ambivalence take their places next to stacks of pancakes and a fourteen-foot-tall sculpture from Vanuatu. In outrageously simple, inexplicably tender prose, Fusselman presses on her nouns until they break, and then, after denotation is no longer their most important job, they perform quite a bit of unexpected and marvelous work. This book is going to haunt me.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by May 20 to join us in reading Idiophone, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with Amy Fusselman about the book!
