The Mechanical Copula is the first collection of short stories by Maria Fusco. Stripping bare the accord of culture and commodity, this sequence of stories tracks the slimy path of social mobility with serious playfulness and an eye for the absurd.

Tales of Donald Sutherland fucking a doll, two men eating a clown, and how the obsessive searching of bins can transform trash into meaning, this is a book about the porous relationship between the extramundane and the average.

“One evening, after surgery had finished at the Health Centre for the day, Nurse Kirby sat at the office computer. She’d decided to search for other babies who’d been born with teeth and discovered sixteen individual cases in Croatia, Ireland, Spain and Italy – but all of those infants had incisor teeth. The only baby she could find like Ruby had been born in Brasilia. In 1989, an uncommonly large baby girl was delivered with four molars, when she was eleven weeks old one of the teeth came out, lodged in her throat and choked her. Must keep an eye on baby Ruby, Nurse Kirby thought to herself, and shut down the computer.”

Maria Fusco is Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also the founding editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a journal for and about experimental art writing.