she lived in Brooklyn and taught for eight years for CUNY Start, an intensive developmental reading and writing program at Kingsborough Community College. Since moving to Pittsburgh in 2018, she has taught for the University of Pittsburgh.
The Invisible World was partially inspired by a freelance job she held while pursuing her MFA, working as a logger on several reality shows including The Haunted on Animal Planet and Psychic Kids on A&E.
Fussner grew up in a 200+ year old house but, sadly, never found evidence of a haunting.
She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their senior dog, Karly.
At Electric Lit Fussner tagged "eight novels about characters who are on TV, want to be on TV, or use television to in some way figure themselves out." One title on the list:
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahRead about the other entries on the list.
A highly anticipated release of 2023, Adjei-Brenyah’s novel takes place in a near-future in which the most popular form of entertainment is “hard action-sports”: literal death-matches between incarcerated individuals who trade in the remainders of their sentences for the chance at freedom, purchased in Blood Points accumulated by killing one another in gladiator-style battles. Participants, known as Links, team up in Chains named after prisons to fight Chains from other prisons. The matches themselves are ticketed events, only viewed live. But the Links spend days marching between Battlegrounds, trips that are livestreamed via small, floating drone-like cameras/microphones, so that conversations, meals, even baths are captured and viewed by millions. The novel is layered with chapters from the perspectives not only of Links but also those of viewers, protestors who believe that action-sports are inhumane, and board members who oversee the regulations of matches. The narration is sprinkled throughout by footnotes that provide facts and statistics on the prison system, reminding readers of the very real human costs of entertainment.
--Marshal Zeringue
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