In this follow-up to last week’s episode on Djuna Barnes, Amy recounts her own fleeting experience as a “stunt reporter” and recommends a recent release of Djuna Barnes’s short stories from McNally Editions. Having glimpsed a copy of Barnes’s <...

Dark and disturbing, yet strangely redemptive, Djuna Barnes’s 1936 modernist masterpiece Nightwood left even its greatest champion, T.S. Eliot, a bit bewildered. Guest Margaret Vandenburg, an expert in modernism, post-modernism and gen...

The works of British writer Dinah Brooke are having a renaissance thanks to two recent reissues by McNally Editions: Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady and Lord Jim at Home (first published in 1971 and 1973, respectively.) Having ...

Likened to a fresh Yorkshire breeze, Malachi Whitaker’s year-in-the-life memoir And So Did I, published in 1939, is a quirky spirit-quest juxtaposing wry humor and contemplative observations amidst the impending threat of global confli...

From a vaudeville act and star turn in Hollywood to a heartbreaking thwarted elopement, we’re willing to bet there’s a lot you don’t know about Helen Keller, author and advocate for the blind, deaf and disabled. Tune in to this week’s ...

In this special episode, Kim and Amy recount their recent visit to The Sitting Room, a unique library and literary salon in Sonoma, CA, dedicated to women's literature. Trip highlights included a stay at a Julia-Morgan-designed architectural ge...

A curious used-book find recently led Amy on a quest to find out the historical significance of a Shameless Hussy Press title from 1976: Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter. Are these poignant letters from the Wild West legend to h...

Republished this year by Valancourt books, Rosalind’s Ashe’s 1976 gothic thriller Moths is a spine-chilling tale of supernatural seduction featuring a femme fatale who lures men to their deaths like lepidoptera to a flame. Gothic lit e...

Grab your 10-gallon hat for this week’s episode as Amy dives deep into Edna Ferber's Giant, a novel that strongly critiqued racial inequity and exposed the unjust treatment of Mexican Americans and immigrants — a conversation that cont...

Often called “the lesbian Bible,” Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness has been sparking debate for nearly a century. Banned in the UK after an infamous obscenity trial, the book remains a lightening rod for readers — som...

Blood sport or poetry in motion? Amy relcutantly weighs in on the sport of boxing this week, reciting Mrs. Elwood Nickerson’s ballad about a historic prize fight in 19th-century England between the British boxer Tom Sayers and America’s “Benici...

In this follow-up to our 2021 episode on Nancy Mitford, we’re turning the spotlight on her younger sister, Jessica (a.k.a. “Decca”) Mitford, an activist and journalist whom Time magazine called “the queen of the muckrakers.” Her influe...

Looking for an escape from the news of the day or just the daily grind? Amy has four tips in this week’s bonus episode to obtain some mental R&R, from a soothing 1977 documentary on Georgia O’Keeffe to a free online reading group tackling D...

With her witty and self-deprecating takes on dating and the single life, the narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl: Or the Battle Against Free Love is the 1918 Yiddish precursor to Girls’ Hannah Horvath, Se...

Amy’s recent attendance at a production of the jukebox musical “& Juliet” has her thinking about how Shakespeare’s ill-fated teenage beauty could have made wiser choices. So, too, might the Baroness Mary Vetsera, the 17-year-old whose utter...

In this encore presentation, we’re reviving a literary suicide scandal that took place among some of the biggest names in the West Coast’s early 20th century bohemian society. Joining us to discuss lost poet Nora May French and her life—and dea...

Whether it’s Lauren Sánchez’s commitment to tight-laced corsets or mainstream media reports that bloomers are officially back in fashion, unmentionables seem worthy of mention in this bonus episode, as Amy leads listeners through a bit of fashi...

Originally drafted in 1939, the Prohibition-era gangster novel The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur remained unpublished for nearly 40 years. Le Sueur used the intervening decades to transform her work into a powerful narrative, focusing on th...

What sort of criteria defines a “lost” lady of lit? Amy reflects on that question in this week’s bonus episode and explains how she and Kim typically decide which authors make the cut for the show. (Though we love her, Jane Austen obviously nee...

What if we told you that there was an ingenious retelling of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights set in post-war Japan that also has shades of Middlemarch and The Great Gatsby? Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel<...

Visitors to the Rare Book Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia can gaze upon a taxidermied raven named Grip who inspired not one, but two literary masterpieces by world-famous authors. A visit to the Charles Dickens Museum in London p...

Woman yearns for child, adopts orangutan instead. Disaster ensues. That's the premise of Gertrude Trevelyan's wonderfully bizarre 1932 novel, Appius and Virginia. We're joined in this encore episode by guest Brad Bigelow, whose obsessi...

It goes without saying that Boiler House Press’s Recovered Books series is near and dear to our hearts. Their recent release of Else Jerusalem’s Red House Alley was the subject of our previous episode, and this week, Amy weighs in on s...

Else Jerusalem’s Red House Alley is a riveting exposé of the sex industry in fin-de-siècle Vienna. A bestseller upon its 1909 publication, the novel was banned by the Nazis in 1933 (along with its 1928 film adaptation) and fel...

Following last week’s episode on Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Amy offers a few updates and draws some comparisons to a more male-centric masterpiece set in Dublin during the same time period: J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man