Books
Books
Smart & Funny
Writer and artist Susan diRende moves through creative media with insight and humor, stopping along the way to connect her writing, art, and teaching to the child of possibility within our hearts. Her tales paint images, her visual art conjures story, and her teaching triggers imagination through metaphor. From the genre fiction of Knife Witch, a fantasy adventure and Unpronounceable, a scifi/fantasy farce, educational the nonfiction of American College 101: How to Survive and Thrive in American Colleges and Universities, she enlightens as she entertains and vice versa. Her work is sometimes cerebral, sometimes silly, but always happy.
Coming June 1 2023 from Aqueduct Press
“Susan diRende presents an alternative off-world reality that will transport you out of whatever everyday funk you happen to be in.”
KNIFE WITCH
A fantasy romp on the high seas where magic itches and krakens talk
KNIFE WITCH
A fantasy romp on the high seas where magic itches and krakens talk
Witches! Pirates! Monsters! vs A kitchen Wench with a knack for knives
A village kitchen girl has few choices in life until a slip of her knife causes invading barbarian pirates to think she’s a witch. They kidnap her to get the “witch” bounty offered by their home coven. She goes willingly enough with only the clothes on her back and her favorite boning knife.
Dubbed “Knife Witch’ by the barbarian captain, Volzh, and his crew, she saves the ship –twice–thanks to what they insist is magic and what she protests is nothing more than an itchy disposition and her mad skills at carving and filleting. They start to think of her as “their” witch and she starts feeling responsible for them as if she actually had the power to protect them.
Which is not what she wants. She doesn’t see herself as capable of defeating anything larger than a chicken headed for the soup pot. That she manages to skewer a kraken before it sinks them all does not help her case. Side note: the kraken is telepathic and develops an amorous fascination with her.
Claiming she’s just a kitchen girl, she goes on to wreak havoc with the evil coven, an even evil-er Empire, the kraken determined to marry her, a world-breaking volcano, and the gods themselves.
Be as must be.
Unpronounceable
UTOPIA WITH AN ATTITUDE
An interstellar romp, this utopia with attitude follows Rose Delancy, a disgruntled Jersey waitress picked by lottery to represent the Earth on a planet of peaceful, pink blobs. Rose settles in and starts teaching the natives all about humans with the help of Hollywood movies, junk food, and the occasional bout of PMS.
“Reminiscent of the space fantasies of Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, this improbable tale spoofs popular star-trooper fiction, as well as the vain politics of both Washington and Hollywood.”
Unpronounceable Excerpts
“I wouldn’t never have left New Jersey, let alone the planet Earth, if it wasn’t for my sister, Alice, who you should know up front got all the genetic engineering bonus points my parents was assigned, leaving me with whatever they could come up naturally, sperm-and-eggwise.”
Family: Why a Jersey Girl Needs to Travel
I’m thinking anyplace still in the same solar system with Alice is not far enough to count as going anywhere, and this is why I never made the effort. Unpronounceable would put over a thousand light-years of interstellar void between me and my sister. I announced my decision to apply right after the minestrone.
Diplomacy: What to do when the President asks if you love your country.
Do I tell the President I couldn’t love a place that was stupid enough to elect him? Okay, so they never proved the graft, but the massacre and pillage of dissidents in a minor South American dictator’s democratic stronghold was there for everybody to see. Fortunately for him, Americans actually believe a person who waves the flag while getting rich robbing foreigners and political losers when he whines that he has just been given a raw deal by the press. Me, I buried the family silver the day he took office. So I huff and puff and beg the question, “What a thing to ask a girl from New Jersey!”
Higher Education & Language Learning
PUBLISHED IN KOREAN
Higher Education & Language Learning
PUBLISHED IN KOREAN
parts of speech
AVAILABLE ONLY IN KOREAN
A different approach to learning English for people who have studied it for years and still cannot communicate effectively. Using concepts to access both sides of the brain, this book returns you to the basics to rebuild your understanding from the ground up.
American College 101
AVAILABLE ONLY IN KOREAN
This book gives you some fundamental principles and a framework of ideas that most students in America bring into the college classroom as well as simple suggestions that you can implement to improve your relationship to your teachers and classmates. These are so basic as to be invisible to most Americans, students and teachers alike.
“American College 101 is one of the important books of the first half of 2012.”
“Learning social codes comes naturally to humans. If you are human, you are a social being. Once you accept that it’s different here, you will quickly pick up on the rules, particularly if you are prepared to see these differences by reading this book.”
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What the Funny?! Newsletter of Women's Humor
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What the Funny?! Newsletter of Women's Humor
"It is a very serious thing to be a funny woman"
Feminist humor is not an oxymoron. All female humor is feminist, because all female humor takes over the body of the audience/reader when it triggers a laugh. It isn't just different in that a woman is making the jokes. Women's humor in general has a different shape from the guys' in what I call the "multiple-orgasm model" that is as different from Aristotle's as lipstick is from a hockey stick. (title quote by the 19th Century humorist, Frances 'Berry" Whitcher)