Lost Ladies of Lit

Send us Fan Mail A 30-year-old virgin named Fortune Dundee moves into a swinging-singles L.A. apartment complex in Cynthia Buchanan’s 1972 debut novel Maiden. Newly reissued by Hagfish Books, this strange, post-modern work was once positioned in relation to The Bell Jar and Play It as It Lays as a comic triumph of feminist prose. Though Lily Tomlin and Robert Altman nearly collaborated on a film version in the Seventies, that prospect — and the book’s popularity — eventually hit the skids. Ha...

Send us Fan Mail To celebrate historic record wins for women in the U.S. midterm elections this week, we're dusting off this episode from this week four years ago. Susanna M. Salter was a 27-year old political activist when she was placed on the 1860 Argonia, Kansas ballot as a cruel joke. She called her tormentors' bluff by becoming the first woman elected to serve as mayor in the United States and one of the first women to serve in any political office in the U.S. We learn more about her in...

Send us Fan Mail In celebration of this week's Blue Tsunami, we're re-airing a previous bonus episode on Katharine Lee Bates. In the months leading up to the midterms, Iowa's newly-minted Democratic governor-elect Rob Sand kicked off each of his campaign events with a crowd singalong of "America the Beautiful," which takes its lyrics from a poem Bates wrote after her 1893 trip to Pike's Peak. Bates was a staunch activist for social justice who decried some of America's political policies in h...

Send us Fan Mail We’re honored to welcome 2026 Booker Prize finalist Rebecca Perry, author of the remarkable debut novel May We Feed The King, as a guest this week to discuss one of her favorite forgotten writers, Rosemary Tonks. A colorful figure in literary London’s Swinging Sixties, Tonks mysteriously retreated from the world after publishing two successful poetry collections and six novels. Perry joins us to discuss Tonks’s offbeat, louche and sardonic 1968 title The Bloater, and she also...

Send us Fan Mail From bushwhacking through the Congo to smoking opium in Shanghai, Emily “Mickey” Hahn turned her need for adventure into captivating copy for The New Yorker, which published her vivid, first-person dispatches over the span of 60 years. Hahn also wrote more than 50 books and became a household name in America following her bestselling 1944 memoir China to Me. Author Julia Cooke joins us to discuss how Mickey’s unapologetic ambitions – (“Nobody told me not to go,” she once quip...