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Originally drafted in 1939, the Prohibition-era gangster novel The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur remained unpublished for nearly 40 years.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

When Edna O’Brien published her debut novel The Country Girls in 1960, she was branded a “Jezebel” in her native Ireland—but that didn’t stop her from completing a poignant trilogy about a pair of friends coming of age in a world for w...

On December 5, 1905, America’s best and brightest literary minds convened at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City to fête the 70th birthday of Mark Twain. Women writers were well-represented on the invite list, including quite a few we’ve fe...

If Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country had a soundtrack, it might include the soft patter of rain on a garret window, jazz drifting from a smoky cafe, the hum of a Vespa on narrow cobblestone streets … and the obnoxious griping...

Venture to the wily, windy moors in this week’s bonus episode as Amy ponders a curiously-cast new screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Kate Bush hit single of the same name. She’ll also weigh in on some favorit...

Langston Hughes called Jessie Redmon Fauset “the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance” with good reason. As literary editor at The Crisis magazine from 1919 until 1926, Fauset discovered and championed some of the most important Black wri...

Leaping off galloping horses, teetering atop speeding locomotives and jumping out of airplanes — feats like these were all in a day’s work for Helen Gibson, a Hollywood film star who put the “hazard” in “The Hazards of Helen,” a wildly popular ...

Dastardly villains are no match for Capitola Black, the audacious heroine at the center of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1859 bestseller, The Hidden Hand. Readers so admired this literary tomboy’s pluck that Capitola became a popular baby name...

Little is known about 15th-century Welsh bard Gwerful Mechain, but here’s what we do know: She threw down some slappin’ feminist rhymes in the “rap battle” equivalent of poem exchanges with her male counterparts. Find out what made the...

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...