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...

The recent hatching of baby eaglets in Big Bear, CA has Amy thinking a lot about patriotism and what it actually means in turbulent times for our country. Lost lady of lit Katharine Lee Bates — a staunch activist for social justice who decried ...

Religious mystics Margery of Kempe and Julian of Norwich lived in close proximity to one another in time and place, yet the lives of these two medieval women couldn’t have been more different. One traveled the world in relentless pursuit of spi...

Having been gifted a parcel of land on a Scottish estate, Amy was recently granted the title of “Lady Amy of Blairadam.” Kim joins her in this week’s bonus episode to “bend the knee” and to discuss the fine-print details of this development cou...

How do you engage with others in a polarized society? Early 19-century writer and freethinker Frances “Fanny” Wright offers an ostensible how-to manual in the witty didactic novel she penned at age 19, A Few Days in Athens. Wright’s ra...

One of the last projects recorded by singer/actress Marianne Faithfull (who passed away in January) was a 2021 spoken word album of English Romantic poetry, including a hauntingly beautiful 12-minute recitation of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” ...

One hundred years ago this week, The New Yorker published its first issue. A few months later, the magazine’s first (and for decades, only) female editor joined the staff. Katharine S. White spen...

How did Martin Luther King Jr. (and eventually, the NAACP) end up the stewards of Dorothy Parker’s literary estate? A life of bold activism prompted the witty writer to quietly bequeath her body of work to advocates for racial justice. But w...