F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be the novel everyone’s talking about this month, but let’s not forget another “Jazz Age” novel that took this country by storm. Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, a tragicomic indictment of e...

In this week’s bonus episode, Amy draws a throughline between the 1970s-era Esquire magazine writing of Nora Ephron and the sharp-witted book reviews of Dorothy Parker. A recent McNally Editions collection of these reviews called C...

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Not the heroines from Angela Carter’s 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber. The British author tackles dark, primal themes in her spin on classic fables and fairy tales, urging women to esche...

There are always two sides to every story. In last week’s episode we discussed Lucy Irvine’s 1983 memoir Castaway, about her year-long experience on a deserted island. This week, Amy turns her attention to the memoir written by Irvine’...

When Lucy Irvine answered a classified ad to play Girl Friday to a real-life Robinson Crusoe on a remote tropical island, she embarked on an enthralling—and at times harrowing—year-long adventure. The result was her bestselling 1983 memoir, Cas...