What abortions should be like.

Dear Dreamers,Since last we convened, I have been a bit sleepless. I’ve woken up at 5 a.m. for a series of mornings, then tossed and turned restlessly for hours. When I finally am able to get back to sleep, my alarm clock rings, and my eyes can barely open to read Twitter from bed. Is this Mercury in retrograde or simply summer wining and whining? That is a matter for another column. Let’s talk dreams!My lack of rest has not, in fact, impacted my dreaming, and maybe it has made it more memorable. In one recent dream I made out with an editor (I will never tell which one; it is not someone here!). In another, an ex-ex-ex-ex-boyfriend confronted me for telling stories about him (I woke up before the matter was resolved). And in yet another, my literary agent presented me with an entire apartment several sizes larger than my own, swept his hands in the air to demonstrate the enormity of his powers, and said, “This is ALL YOURS.” Days later I went to check out my new digs and a real estate agent was holding an open house there, trying to sell the place. I immediately pulled out my iPhone and searched for my agent’s phone number; when I finally found it and called the phone rang and rang and I couldn’t get through. I woke up with that common post-dream feeling of relief and regret — that apartment was not, after all, mine to lose! But it had been a very, very, very nice apartment.

You're going to wizard summer camp and I don't want to hear another word about it, mister. Now get up, it's a beautiful day out.

Fiction from the very real, very Canadian Mindy Hung.

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.

Haley Crain on 2013's most popular TV shows.

The mystery of who authored J.K. Rowling's new book, solved.

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.

You must act as though your actions arise from a willingness to keep saying “Yes, and...” like a somnambulist or automaton. You know assumptions are as good as beliefs and that no prizes are forthcoming

Jessica Valenti kicks off her "Eat Me" series with antipasta.

Victoria Patterson on appearance, sports commentary, and Wimbledon women.

It's actually really nice here.

This, the finest hostess gift ever, was acquired in Newburg, Ontario, from an artist who had despaired of ever selling it.Let us reflect on his stained-glass visage, left lonely for years on a card table while others picked out pictures of flowers and cats, and discuss our week.

A sneak peek at the script introducing Jennifer, Charlie's long-lost lesbian daughter, on Two And a Half Men.

Carolita Johnson on happy endings.