What to Read When: A Holiday Book-Gifting Guide
Rumpus editors share their favorite books to gift to friends and family!
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Posts Tagged: Mallory Ortberg
Notable San Francisco: 3/14–3/20
Literary events and readings in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Just Doing It: A Conversation with Daniel Ortberg
Mallory Ortberg discusses their new book, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, what it means to be a self-taught writer, and questioning gender.
...moreNotable Los Angeles: 3/5–3/11
Literary events and reading in and around L.A. this week!
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What to Read When 2018 Is Just Around the Corner
While we can’t promise that 2018 won’t find us facing more political upheaval, we can assure you that there will be great literature to offer moments of escape and inspiration.
...moreNotable San Francisco: 11/1–11/7
Literary events and readings in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Lady Killers and Our Obsession with Murder: Talking with Tori Telfer
Tori Telfer discusses her first book Lady Killers and the fragile “social saran wrap” that keeps us all from killing each other.
...moreThis Week in Essays
Noriko Nakada writes with mesmerizing beauty on outrunning her darkness for Catapult. In the latest TORCH installment at The Rumpus, Nadia Owusu traces the inherited trauma in her family’s history.
...moreKeeping It Real
Sometimes God needs to cut the crap and level with his devotees. As we enter the final week of regular posts at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has given us an updated translation of such moments: But you, son of man, can I just be honest with you for a minute? Do not be rebellious like that rebellious […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
In a blow to nerdy librarians everywhere, The Toast is closing. And what does the closing of The Toast mean for online community? How social media changes the fame game. Archiving content on nickel plate. When websites manipulate you.
...more(Attractive) Debut Novelists Earn Millions
Emma Cline received $2m advance for The Girls, due out in June, which puts her near the top of a growing list of first-time writers with advances in the millions. Last year, City on Fire earned Garth Risk Hallberg a $2m advance. The allure of debut novelists isn’t always an economic issue: Given the amount of […]
...moreThe Faces of The Face on the Milk Carton
The YA novel The Face on The Milk Carton has marked a thrilling yet disturbing rite of passage for many young readers over the past 25 years, iconic right down to its simple, haunting cover—which many of those readers could easily conjure from memory. Mallory Ortberg, literary comedian and maestro of The Toast, was one […]
...moreEvil Characters You Probably Shouldn’t Love But Do Anyway
Mallory Ortberg takes one for the team and admits to loving some unlovable characters like Henry VIII and Rumpelstiltskin.
...moreLit Theorists for Babies
WOMAN: Peekabo! I see you! Peekaboo! I see you! BABY DERRIDA: How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has another entry, this time on Jacques Derrida, in “How to Talk to Babies,” a series of humorous satires […]
...moreThe Bro-ification of Beowulf
BEOWULF: yeah actually I once held my breath for like a million hours it was crazy my friends weren’t even worried because I fight guys underwater like all the time Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg re-imagines the classic literary hero Beowulf in all the trappings and dirtbag swagger of a bro.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo discusses feminism, coloring, badass women, and being a troller of trolls.
...moreQuestioning Harper Lee’s Editor Answers
Here’s an author who has staunchly refused interviews and publicity since 1960, who hasn’t breathed a word about her interest in publishing another book to either family or friends, but who is suddenly fine with releasing her decades-old Mockingbird prequel, despite the fact that it doesn’t sound like anyone at her publisher has actually been […]
...moreReal Life Sci-Fi?
Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg gives us a compendium of signs that you’re stuck in a soft sci-fi novel. Among the more notable signifiers: You live in a world where robots masturbate, for some reason. The ship’s doctor has a drinking problem. You’re going to have to go through the asteroid belt you’d hoped to avoid […]
...moreIf Scarlett O’Hara had a Cell Phone
For NPR, Neda Ulaby sits down with Mallory Ortberg to talk about Texts from Jane Eyre, Ortberg’s new book that speculates what literature’s best-known characters might text if they owned cell phones. “I just immediately thought, ‘Oh God, Scarlett O’Hara with a cell phone would be horrifying,’” Ortberg says, clearly as amused as she was horrified. “And it was […]
...moreGet A Little Less Precious
Mallory Ortberg, founder of The Toast and general source of hilarity and wit, talks to the Guardian about her just-released book Texts from Jane Eyre, creating a humorous website for intelligent women, and why you shouldn’t strive for perfection when writing online: It helps to get a little less precious about your writing and realise […]
...moreArchitect like a motherfucker
Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg asks the very important question, what if we talked about architecture the way we do about writing. We’re obviously fond of the above selection, but there’s lots of funny to be had there.
...moreRaise Your Glass to The Toast
Here’s a new website you’ll definitely want to add to your favorite Google Reader substitute. The Toast, started by Hairpin alums Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg, is “a daily blog that publishes features on everything from literary characters that never were to female pickpockets of Gold Rush-era San Francisco,” with an emphasis on “women and […]
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