You cannot possibly understand how bad I am at keeping news to myself, nor what a toll keeping this particular news took on my frail and mortal frame, but please share in my joy: Roxane Gay is coming to The Toast, where she will be running our very first vertical, The Butter. She’s officially starting on October 15th, and there will be plenty more details to come, but in the meantime please join me in dancing excitedly about the room.

What is a vertical, exactly? Oh, it’s a bit hard to describe — it’s part of our company, but it’s also its own thing. Think of it as the FX to our FOX. Wait, is FX owned by FOX? I ought to know this. You’ll be able to visit it here. If you were raised Christian, think of it as part of a Trinity; eternally begotten of the Toast, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Toast.

What will this particular vertical be like? WHATEVER ROXANE WANTS IT TO BE.

Would you care to be more specific? Roxane says it will “focus on cultural criticism and personal essays that make readers think and feel.”

I’ve never been on the Internet before. Who is Roxane Gay?

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.

Both An Untamed State and Bad Feminist have made it onto the New York Times bestsellers list, incidentally. (She is too good for us. We know that. Believe me when I tell you that we know she is too good for us.)

You may follow her on Twitter here, if you do not already (I highly recommend it).

Can I pitch The Butter? Yes. But give us a minute. We’ll tell you how as The Butter launch approaches.

Gay-ish quotes from classic literature that sum up how Nicole and self feel about this news:

“Now we shan’t never be parted, sir. It’s finished.”
-Alec Scudder, Maurice

“And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”
-Ruth 1:15-17

“Okay, then, let’s not get caught. Let’s keep going.”
-Thelma, Thelma and Louise

“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
-Pip, Great Expectations

“But I’m a woman. I love you, I say. Whatever happen, whatever you do, I love you.”
–The Color Purple

“You’re just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. That’s what you are, a bee charmer. Go on, you old bee charmer, tell me a good tall tale.”
–Fried Green Tomatoes

“He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine; – I am sure he is, – I feel akin to him, – I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. […] I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered: – and yet, while I breathe and think I must love him.”
-Jane, Jane Eyre

“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
-Virginia Woolf