The Toast
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Questioning 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,…
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Real 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…
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Fat and Sexy
My curves are not in all the right places but they still bring men to their knees. This, despite the fact that I have been told that because I am fat I can’t expect to be loved, desired, to have…
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Interviewing Lady Writers: A Primer
If she is a writer of colour; ask how her race has impacted upon her writing. Try to make it both your first and last question, after the attractiveness and skin thing. If she is blonde; mention it. If she…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday, Joyland published “You Said ‘Always’” an excerpt from Ester Bloom’s novel-in-progress, The Sex Lives of Other People. In the story, which has the momentous feel of the novel’s opening, the narrator, Annie, gets dumped by her boyfriend after…
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More Sunday Links
I went to see Interstellar the other night, in need of three hours of sci-fi escapism from the terrestrial horrors of the last week, and while, frankly, it’s sort of an incomprehensible film, it not only served its purpose, it…
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Like Butter on Toast
The Butter, The Toast’s new vertical run by Rumpus Essays Editor Emeritus Roxane Gay, has just launched. To present her latest venture, Gay wrote a Butter FAQ, stretching, in her typical style, from submission guidelines (spoiler: no guidelines!) to Nick Jonas,…
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Why Didion Remains
We like to think of Joan Didion as glamorous, the sunglasses-wearing, VOGUE-working, New York loving-and-leaving writer that we all could have been if only life had turned out a little differently. We imagine her sitting down to edit with a…
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Get 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…
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Boston, Take It or Leave It
Poe is more of a Bostonian than he liked to think, not in spite of but because of his criticism of the place, because of his keen awareness of the oft-commented upon socio-economic differences that still plague Boston today. Surprisingly,…
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On Being a South Asian American
Tanuja Desai Hidier’s 2002 Born Confused was the first-ever South Asian American coming-of-age novel. At The Toast, she talks with Safy Hallan Farah about her debut book, its new sequel Bombay Blues, and future projects.