Books Texts from Peter Pan and The Little Prince
Texts from your favorite boys.
Books
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Books The Many Future Mrs. Skywalkers
Possible solutions to the Luke Skywalker Girlfriend problem.
Books Force-Ranking the Mitford Sisters
Some Mitfords are simply better than others.
Books Emily Books Book Club: King Kong Theory
A chat with Emily, of Emily Books, on King Kong Theory.
Books Cut From the Classics: Bettina Thrush
Rebecca Jane Stokes takes us through another installment of Cut From The Classics.
Books Texts From Moby Dick
Text Messages from Moby Dick
Books Slightly Less Beloved Classics: Cold Comfort Farm and Nightingale Wood
Slightly Less Beloved Classics takes a second look at the lesser-known works of celebrated authors. Here we shall decide what is to remain by the wayside and what is to be led gaily back home, lauded with timbrels and trumpets and fatted calves. This first installment concerns English novelist Stella Gibbons and the insufficiently famous Nightingale Wood. Stella Gibbons, if she is remembered now at all, is best known for the admittedly delightful Cold Comfort Farm (later made into an equally delightful film in 1995 with Kate Beckinsale and the bad guy from A Knight's Tale), her satirical 1932 novel about the tragedies of rural English life, where Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters get it in equal measure.If you are a particular type of bookish woman--reflective without being sentimental, easily drawn out but rarely forward--this is the kind of book you read often and deeply cherish. You know about what Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed. You may very well long for your own cletterin' brush. But Stella Gibbons did not lay down her pen in 1932, content to skewer ANGUISH ON THE MOORS but the once, and write nevermore. She wrote more than twenty additional novels, the best of which may very well be Nightingale Wood.It is more than a bit like the Cinderella story. There's an orphan of sorts, and a prince, although the stepsisters are more prosaic and self-centered than cruel. They have their own adventures to worry about. Sophie Dahl, in the introduction to the 2008 edition, writes that "Prince Charming is charming, yes, but he's also a little dull, vulgar and complacent. Cinderella is beautiful and true, yet a tad apathetic. Also, there are multiple garden parties, an excellent addition to any novel.
Books This Week in Reading: Canadian Ghosts
Books about Canadian ghosts and history.
Books Gentle Epiphanies For Books I Will Never Write
Epiphanies by the dozen.
Books The Five Book Covers You’ll See In Airport Bookstores This Summer
You'll see them everywhere and you won't buy any of them.
Books The First Time I Saw Porn
Ashley Cardiff on sleepovers, accidental porn, and that jerk Sarah G.
Books This Week in Reading: Jeff Himmelman and Robert Sawyer
Reading with Nicole in rural Canadian mode.
Books Cut from the Classics: Affable Johnson
Exploring the short life of Affable Johnson, cut from Charles Dickens' seminal classic "Great Expectations."
Books This Week in Reading
I'm really excited to talk about this Helen Garner novel, The Spare Room, but first, let's talk about how I came to be reading it. I was traveling with my best friend and her parents, which is the sort of thing you usually do in high school with people whose parents can afford to go nice places and yours can't, so they bring you along, and you feel grateful and awkward and young, but this wasn't like that, this was another kind of thing, which is when you and your best friend are really genuinely fond of your respective parents and welcome the opportunity to be with them as adults.And we were driving around, and my best friend's family is Australian, while I am Canadian, so you can imagine the elaborate system of unnecessary apologies and "please, it's my turn to take the middle seat," "are you comfortable? yes! I'm quite comfortable" Commonwealth twitterings we engaged in, and the entire experience was lovely, and then we fell into talking about books. We were talking first about Paul Theroux, the travel writer who wrote my favourite super-weird book, Sir Vidia's Shadow, about how he and V.S. Naipaul used to be besties, and then had a Falling-Out as a result of (among literally a thousand dishily-discussed things) Theroux finding all the books he'd written and then personally inscribed for Naipaul for sale in a London shop. It is seriously a book-length bitch session, and I could not love it more. I think I've mentioned this somewhere before, but I actually ran into two OTHER friends of Naipaul, who were, no joke, the "best friends from childhood" that Vanessa Bayer and Fred Armisen play on SNL, and asked them within four seconds of being introduced if they had read Sir Vidia's Shadow, and they said: "Oh, of COURSE. We all have! Thousands of times! But we tell him we haven't, and we hide it when he comes over."V.S. Naipaul: your friends are reading Paul Theroux's book about you behind your back.
Books Introducing the Emily Books Book Club
I've subscribed to Emily Books since the beginning, mostly just because Emily and Ruth have dynamite, dynamite taste, and it's like having a personal shopper for reasonably-obscure, fabulous reading. So we asked Emily if she would tell us a bit about how Emily Books came to be, and wheedled a discount code out of her (readers of The Toast can take 20% off purchases from Emily Books -- subscriptions or individual books -- by entering the code THETOAST at checkout.) This month's pick is King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, a book of essays about prostitution, rape, femininity, and French-inflected black humor. Emily and I will discuss it together in a post at the end of the month. We're hoping you'll join in, but I'm the only one who's duty-bound to read it. - Ed.Almost two years ago, Ruth Curry and I opened Emily Books with No More Nice Girls, a essay collection by rock critic and radical utopian feminist Ellen Willis, as our first monthly pick. The book was out of print, so we got the non-exclusive rights to republish it as an ebook -- the first of many times we'd do this. Making out of print or hard to find books by women available as ebooks was one of the reasons we opened our store; we figured that if we wanted to read these books, other people would too. Luckily for us, and for the authors we chose, this has turned out to be true: we now have subscribers and customers all over the world. The incredible thing to me now is that, in October of 2011, we thought we might run out of books. There had to be a limit, we figured, to the number of brilliant, necessary books by women that had been forgotten or remained unsung or were only known by a small cult following. We figured we would be able to stay in business for a year, maybe, and then we'd have to figure out something else.
