Sydney Rende is a writer and editor. You can read her work in The New York Times Style Magazine, Carve Magazine, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University.
Rende's debut short story collection is I Could Be Famous.
At Lit Hub she tagged six sad books by funny women "who give grief and humor the equal respect they deserve." One title on the list:
Weike Wang, ChemistryRead about another entry on the list.
Weike Wang’s debut novel is quick, wry, and fraught with self-deprecating humor. Wang’s unnamed narrator, whose boyfriend Eric has just proposed,is pursuing her PhD in chemistry without much success. Through often fragmented narration, we see her unravel as she fails to meet the expectations she’s set for herself. But even in her darkest moments of identity crisis, her insights are self-aware, profound, and, yes, funny, including a bit where she impulsively chops off her hair because her mother told her that “too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.”
Chemistry is among K.D. Walker's eight top campus novels set in grad school and Anne Heltzel's seven novels about women who refuse to fit in.
--Marshal Zeringue
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