heroines

Kate Zambreno has had a busy couple of years. In 2010, she published her first novel, O Fallen Angel, followed by Green Girl a year later. Her latest book, the just-published Heroines, is a personal narrative woven with the rich and often overlooked history of a group of modernist women writers she calls “a union of forgotten or erased wives.”

Zambreno carries readers through the lives of women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, and Jean Rhys, using the lens of their experiences to dissect her own role as an emerging writer and a new wife, and challenging the negative stereotypes around women writing subjectively by doing just that. The result is a brave, enlightening, and brutally honest historical inquiry that will leave readers with an urgent desire to tell their own stories.

Reggie Jackson. Wilt Chamberlain. Frank Gifford. Pete Rose. What do these guys have in common? Besides their dexterity with various kinds of balls, they were, in 1978, among the familiar faces bought and swapped on trading cards.

They also weren’t women, a fact duly noted by 8-year-old Melissa Rich, an avid collector of trading cards who had something of a feminist awakening when she noticed that her baseball cards were skewing really, really, male. She brought this to the attention of her mother, Lois, who in turn consulted with her sister, Barbara Egerman, and soon enough the idea for a series of trading cards highlighting the achievements of women was taking shape.