The Toast
-
A 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…
-
Are 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.
-
(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…
-
The 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…
-
More 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…
-
Tech 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…
-
Imbalance 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…
-
Sad 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.
-
Fear 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…
-
Writing 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.
-
In 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.
-
Why 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…