The Toast
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Hunger is the Beginning
Desire is transformative, and transgressive: whether it’s an unpeeled onion or a noble lover, to want something, especially for women, can never be entirely benign. A common consequence for careless appetite in fairy tales is monstrous birth– a child that…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Every good story is rooted in conflict, and most of us learned the different types of conflict in our high school literature classes like clockwork, year in and year out: man v. man, man v. self, man v. society, man…
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Roxane Gay Will Butter The Toast
Rumpus Essays Editor Emeritus Roxane Gay will helm a new Internet vertical being launched by The Toast. The Butter will primarily include content drawn from submissions, although Gay herself plans on posting two to three times a week. Contributors will be…
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The Ugly Side
At The Toast, Caitlin Keefe Moran writes about the difficult women in the long-forgotten work of Nancy Hale: The Prodigal Women, now sadly out of print, is a strange, giant, wonderful book, full of desperate, sad, sometimes wicked, sometimes pitiable,…
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On Death and Ice Cream
Rumpus contributor Julie Morse remembers her father over at The Toast: During the last handful of years of his life my father became one of those unruly cool dads, perhaps exceptionally unruly. My sister and I had no curfews and he…
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The Little [Terrifying] Prince
The latest installment of The Toast’s delicious “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” series, we are gleeful to report, takes on Le Petit Prince. Featuring quotes like “I drew him my hunger and my thirst. It had long teeth, and a long…
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You Have a Problem
Did you know that owning 1,000 books or more means you have a problem? We’re all in trouble. Rachel Kramer Brussel explains at The Toast: Books were far and away the most challenging possessions for me to part with. Unopened Talk magazines,…
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Building Our Own Communities
As Ramadan approaches and we look for a family to break fast with come sundown, the realities of being a transgender Muslim set in. Flashing all of the proper signals I pass through gendered space unscathed, always left fearing how…
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The Beyoncé of Poetry
She won the Pulitzer in 1923, but when newspapers recounted her public readings, they more often focused on her outfits than her writing. Her glamorous and occasionally scandalous life made her a celebrity, but her celebrity (along with other trends…
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Tripping on Pronouns
Even if you know what is a pronoun and what “gender” means, you’ll want to read this linguistic time-tripping essay on the link that ties the part of speech to the noun class by Gretchen McCulloch over at The Toast.
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Architect 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.
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The Beats and Their Women
While their politics and art were radical and dangerous for their time, the Beat Generation’s views toward women were not that much different than those of the man in the grey flannel suit they rebelled against. Women played an important…