Robert Isaacs and J. Wynn Rousuck at The Baltimore Book Festival

Join us at 4PM for an event with Robert Isaacs in conversation with J. Wynn Rousuck, celebrating Robert Isaacs’ raucous and heart-full new novel, It’s Hard to Be an Animal!

For readers of Shark Heart, Remarkably Bright Creatures and Hollow Kingdom, this novel follows a lonely, conflict-averse man whose sudden ability to understand animals sends him on a wild romp around NYC, and ultimately helps him discover his own voice.

Robert Isaacs has survived an eventful life. He has escaped an angry hippo in the Okavango Delta, dodged tear gas on the Mount of Olives, roasted marshmallows over cooling lava in the Guatemalan highlands, and been run over by a boat off the west coast of Australia. In his youth he supported himself as a juggler and unicyclist on the streets of San Francisco before turning to music; over the course of thirty years he conducted everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the Cook Islands, released a dozen CDs, and earned a Grammy nomination. It’s Hard to Be an Animal is his first novel.

J. Wynn Rousuck is the award-winning theater critic at WYPR, 88.1 FM. Prior to that, she was the theater critic at The Baltimore Sun for 23 years, during which she reviewed more than 3,000 plays. Her acclaimed debut novel, Please Write: A Novel in Letters, won the 2024 Best Novel award from the Dog Writers Association of America. Her nonfiction has appeared in magazines ranging from American Theatre to Dog World. She was a faculty member for more than two decades at the Tony Award-winning Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and has also taught writing and theater at Goucher College and in various programs at Johns Hopkins University.