The Fraught Business of Identity: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know
All You Can Ever Know insists that the stories we use to understand ourselves should be allowed as much complexity as the truth dictates.
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Posts Tagged: The Toast
Re-Thinking Adoption: A Conversation with Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung discusses her debut memoir, ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung discusses ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW.
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Hey Ladies in Waiting
I know lots of people/the international press is making a huge deal out of everything, but it’s still just me, your girl Meghan, and my fiancé, His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales.
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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.
...moreNext Letter in the Mail: Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung writes you a Letter in the Mail!
...moreEnglish Is Not Dying, You Elitists
Pop linguist Gretchen McCulloch unpacks the many wrongful assumptions about language behind the idea that emojis will cause the “death” of the English language: No, English is in ruddy good health. In fact, it’s not only not under threat, it’s the aggressor. The only problem with English is the way it’s pushing out thousands of […]
...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 […]
...moreThe Catch-22 of Representation
Heroine Complex author Sarah Kuhn writes on her impulse as a child to dislike Jubilee, the Marvel superhero she was “supposed” to identify with as an Asian-American woman, and the pressures of creating representative characters for women of color in a marketplace with so few: Instead of worrying that the entertainment I consumed elevated bad […]
...moreLost Languages
When we can’t bear to look at the object of our desire straight-on, a metaphor becomes necessary. Over at The Toast, Iona Sharma throws herself into the study of Gaelic, contemplating its beauty and its dwindling use as she unpacks her complicated relationship with Hindi: Here’s how the story is supposed to end. That because […]
...moreGrowing Up with ADHD
Despite the narrative that we are over-diagnosing ADHD in children, symptoms of ADHD often go unrecognized in girls. At the Toast, Grace Lidinsky-Smith discusses navigating grade school with undiagnosed ADHD, her experiences with feelings of shame, and the impact of finally receiving treatment: I wanted to write this for my younger self, and for all […]
...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.
...moreA Sandy In Rizzo’s Clothing
At The Toast, Mara Wilson discusses her relationship with Grease, Sandy, and Rizzo as a kid who wanted to believe the movie was an accurate portrayal of being a teenager: Months before I saw Grease, I had cut my hair short in an attempt to change the way people looked at me. They saw me […]
...moreAre You Living an E.M. Forster Novel?
Ever feel like your life feels eerily drawn out of A Room With a View or Howard’s End? Check off this checklist and find out if you’re in a whirlwind of irony and hypocrisy.
...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 […]
...moreMore Money, (Not) More Problems
In a powerful and anecdotal essay at The Toast, Nicole Chung discusses how money-related anxiety has stayed with her into adulthood, and how disparity between her and her husband’s attitudes toward money influences the dynamic of their marriage: It makes it sound as though my money-related anxiety is nothing more than an unfortunate personality quirk, […]
...moreTech Companies Profit While Writers Starve
Digital media companies are suddenly worried about declining ad revenue, and the venture capitalists funding these companies have also turned off the faucet of cash as they realize that success stories like BuzzFeed and Mashable are not the unicorns everyone thought they were. Instead, the big winners have been the technology companies like Google and […]
...moreImbalance of Power
In a powerful essay at The Toast, Katie Rose Guest Pryal shares her story of fearing being kicked out of her graduate program after rejecting her professor’s sexual advances: I was truly terrified—all of my hard work and all of my student loans, they would be for nothing. He had all of the power, and I […]
...moreSad Meals in a Sad Novel
Eating while alone can be a sad experience. At The Toast, read about all the sad meals in the sad novel Wuthering Heights.
...moreFear and Loathing in the Locker Room
Over at The Toast, Naomi Gordon-Loebl recounts the particularly fraught experience of being gender-nonconforming while in the locker room: My parents raised me to believe that my boy-girl self was beautiful and natural. I got a crewcut and began to wear men’s clothes when I was 15 years old. It was the single most self-loving—and […]
...moreWriting Adoption
Over at Catapult, Nicole Chung, Managing Editor at The Toast, is editing a special series on adoption. The series so far includes essays by Jasmine Sanders, Megan Galbraith, and Michele Leavitt. New essays drop every Tuesday through the month of March.
...moreIn Retrospect, We Shouldn’t Have Pulled the Car Over
At The Toast, Elizabeth Strassner provides us with surefire ways to determine whether or not we’re in a Flannery O’Connor short story. We are pretty sure the cat hates us.
...moreWhy Are You On Your Knees? That Looks Boring
In an essay for The Toast, Anne Marquette reveals the parallels between living as asexual and living as an atheist. In both cases, society surrounds you with guidelines to peak experiences—salvation, true love—that don’t apply to you. The only sensible thing to do is make up your own rules: There will always be a tension […]
...moreIs That Book for Jocks or Nerds?
There is virtually no end to lists that attempt to catalog the best books in history, but what about a list that scrutinizes whether a book suits a jock sensibility or a nerd sensibility? Over at the Toast, Bridget Gibson scrutinizes the MLA Top 100 Novels list and categorizes which novels are “jock” novels and which […]
...moreThe Worthwhile Relationship in Collaborative Writing
Writing is most often thought of as a solitary activity, and writers know the hazards of too many captains steering the ship of a single piece. At The Toast, Jilly Gagnon considers the ups and downs of working with a writing partner and concludes that, despite many frustrating aspects, the experience is ultimately rewarding: Writing with someone […]
...moreBuilding Your Dream Library
For the daytime version of your library you need some natural light. How will your library illustrate the romance of pursuing knowledge if you can’t see dust particles floating in sunbeams? How are you going to achieve enlightenment without light? Book-lovers know all too well the struggle to find places to store all their books; who […]
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
...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.
...moreThe Gift of Gratefulness
The worst insult people hurl at adoptees is that they are “ungrateful” and should “go back” (to their “own” countries, to their old families). That is the moment when adoption becomes a gift—because that is the moment when it becomes clear that adoption belongs to people like the adoptive parent and not people like the […]
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