The Toast
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Unreliable Men
The unreliable narrator lends a particular type of voice to a story. After breaking down unreliable narrators by gender, Elizabeth Weinberg concludes that there are differences between male and female unreliable narrators—primarily, that male narrators lack empathy. I’m a firm believer…
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Working Girls of Laura Jean Libbey
Katja Jylkka, writing over at The Toast, looks at the working girl novels of Laura Jean Libbey—19th century love stories featuring “innocent,” “bewitching” heroines. Though these pretty young women were able to attract “the wolfish attention of every male in…
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DIY Small Press
Want to start your own small press and wondering how to go about doing so? Spencer Madsen, founder of Sorry House, is sharing everything he’s learned over at The Toast. Spencer thought up Sorry House at the start of 2013, and in…
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Before the “Dumb Blonde” Joke
Literary blondes have always held a totemic power….Sex, politics, and power: fictional blondes had it all. For the Toast, Stassa Edwards looks back at centuries of literature and culture—Petrarch’s Laura, Middlemarch‘s Rosamond Vincy, Taylor Swift—to parse the semiotics of blondness. From…
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“Start Your Year with Something Sweet”
The lunar new year has come and gone, but Charlene Cheung’s essay about what Chinese New Year celebrations meant to her growing up is still ripe for reading. It’s a lovingly rendered flashback to when Cheung was still eager to…
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How Well Do You Know Library of Congress Subjects?
Which book can be comprehensively defined by the keywords “married people,” “college teachers,” and “New England”? What about “totalitarianism” and “London (England)”? See how well you can categorize bookshelves with this quiz about Library of Congress subjects from The Toast.
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Writing Even Though You Can’t Make A Living Off It
The best things on my CV—the ones I almost want to use comic sans for, just so they’ll stand out—haven’t paid me. In an essay for The Toast, Jilly Gagnon lays bare the realities of the writing life: handling 3,128…
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On Missing A Bikini Kill Show
It’s not just punk clubs in small towns that are fragile ecosystems. All the worlds we inhabit are malleable places, made and destroyed and made again. The Toast has a magnificent piece by Jessanne Collins on the riot-grrrl world as…
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Real-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde totally hooked up. Maybe. Probably.…
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“I Just Wasn’t In the Mood to Be Bossed Around”
In the latest installment of The Toast’s “unglamorous series about DUIs and drinking problems,” Rebecca Pederson relates everything she remembers about being hit by an intoxicated driver while crossing the street one night. It’s remarkable not just for the inherent…
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Cool SXSW Panel Needs Votes
Three of our favorite publications—the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, and the New Inquiry—are joining forces to create a SXSW panel. Titled “Rebooting Cultural Criticism on the Web,” the panel hopes to address questions like: “How do we make literary…
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Ask A Real Live Literary Agent
Rumpus readers will definitely want to read The Toast’s new series “A Literary Agent Answers Your Fevered Questions.” (NB—the questions cover a wide range of feverity, so if yours just kind of has a warm forehead, feel free to send…