Cover of The Pharmacist's Mate

The Pharmacist's Mate

Named "It" Discovery Writer of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, Amy Fusselman took readers and critics alike by storm when McSweeney's published this powerful little book. In The Pharmacist's Mate, she writes of her father's death and her own attempts to become pregnant, weaving in excerpts from her father's World War II journal-written while he was a pharmacist's mate on the Liberty ship George E. Pickett. Fusselman creates a work both startlingly real and deeply funny-all wrapped up in writing so clever and warm it will leave you feeling that everything will be okay.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 112 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Pharmacist's Mate? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Pharmacist's Mate. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. McSweeney's #17 Shares mcsweeneys, fiction
  2. McSweeney's #38 Shares mcsweeneys, fiction, nonfiction
  3. Vacation Shares mcsweeneys, fiction, literary fiction
  4. The Smoking Diaries Shares memoir, nonfiction, biography

“People who read The Pharmacist's Mate tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend
  2. If You Knew Then What I Know Now
  3. Misadventure
  4. Here They Come

“If you want more of the same (biography about father daughter), start with these.”

  1. Girl in High Heels: Intimate Confessions of a London Stripper
  2. I Wish There Was Something That I Could Quit
  3. Secrets of the Widow's Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to The Da Vinci Code
  4. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume A: Colonial Period to 1800

“If it was the mcsweeneys that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. McSweeney's #1
  2. McSweeney's #1-3
  3. McSweeney's #33
  4. Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
  2. The Pharmacist of Auschwitz: The Untold Story
  3. Anchor in the Storm
  4. Silent Secrets