FUNNY LADIES OF COMEDY: STARS OF COMIC FICTION TALK SHOP, featuring Susan Coll, Amy Fussellman, Sydney Rende, & Betsy Boyd

Three acclaimed women authors talk about their latest books, the craft of humor, and the role of comic fiction in the current social and political landscape. What makes something funny? Why is humor important? How does absurdity function both as entertainment and as a form of commentary on serious matters? The books under discussion range widely in focus, from the world of literary event planning to the interior lives of the social media generation to the surreal landscape of the afterlife. This meeting of great comic minds promises to be inspiring, profound, and laugh-out-loud funny. Novelist Susan Coll , whose newly published novel, Word Salad, “is a moving, thoughtful exploration of the complicated nature of grief and the power that books have to help us find ourselves when we’re lost,” writes national bestseller Grant Grinder. Coll is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore. Amy Fusselman ‘s latest book, Cloud Six , which Literary Hub named A Most Anticipated Book of the Year, is a comic novel about an unfortunate couple navigating the lowest tier of heaven. Baltimore’s Sydney Rende ’s short story collection has been called “an invaluable tip-sheet to the way we live now, I Could Be Famous captures perfectly the hazards of young womanhood in a world where everyone is desperate to be looked at, but wary of being seen.” (Jonathan Dee, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Privileges). Betsy Boyd, director of Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore, joins us as moderator. Her fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Five Points, and StoryQuarterly.