books Archives - The Toast

11046830_10152645355625025_2942093833607366074_o

How To Tell If You Are In A Terry Pratchett Novel

Elyse Martin Books Mar 16, 2015

Previously in this series.

You are a wizard and practice magic. Even tourists who do not speak your language know how this will end: badly for you [urinating dog] [urinating dog] [urinating dog].

You are a wizard and do not practice magic, which means you’re in no danger at all of going Bursar.^{^[1]}

No matter what country you find yourself in, someone always offers you a cutthroat deal on very dubious-looking sausages in buns.

You think it’s perfectly reasonable to try and kill Father Christmas the Hogfather.

Sometimes people die. Then they campaign for the rights of the undead.

112 Comments

An Interview with Juliana Delgado Lopera, Author of ¡Cuéntamelo!

Lauren O'Neal Books Mar 12, 2015

Previously by Lauren O’Neal: A Woman Reviews Patricia Lockwood.

When she was fifteen, Juliana Delgado Lopera moved with her family from Bogotá, Colombia to Miami. As her mother became more and more involved with an Evangelical Christian church there, Juliana “started realizing I was queer—and it was a horrible realization when you come from a very religious family.”

After high school, she left Florida for UC Berkeley, where she applied because she knew Judith Butler taught there. It was more or less impossible to actually take a class from Butler, but Juliana found something better.

In a class on queer visual culture, Juliana met Adela Vázquez, a trans woman from Cuba who talked to the class about the graphic novel Sexilio (“Sexile”), based on her life. The two hit it off right away, and it wasn’t long before Adela became Juliana’s adopted queer mother, drawing her into a community of LGBT Latino immigrants in San Francisco. Listening to members of that community reminisce about their lives in Adela’s apartment, Juliana decided the world needed to hear their stories.

Her project started as a cover story for SF Weekly, and then, funded by a grant from the Queer Cultural Center and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, became the book ¡Cuéntamelo! (“Tell Me About It”), a collection of oral histories by LGBT Latino immigrants over age 45, now available as an ebook. The book documents the life stories of Adela and five others, with gorgeous illustrations by Laura Cerón Melo (Juliana’s then-fiancée, now wife, who is also from Colombia). It has two sides, so you can read it in Spanish, then flip it over and read the English translation. (The only drawback is that if you read it on the bus, everyone to your right thinks you’re reading a book upside down.)

2 Comments

Voyage de Victor Hugo: A Literary Pilgrimage

Elyse Martin Books Mar 12, 2015

Previously by Elyse Martin: How To Tell If You Are In A Victor Hugo Novel. The Toast’s previous literary pilgrimages can be found here.

As much as I love Victor Hugo’s turns of phrase, as amused as I am by his excesses, and as indebted as I am to him for teaching me how to think about social justice issues, I have to admit he had some mistaken notions. One of them being that he was a good interior decorator.

The proof: Hugo’s home on Guernsey, an island Victor Hugo himself hailed as “my probable tomb.”

Guernsey was Victor Hugo’s home for over twenty years, following Napoleon III’s coup d’etat and Hugo’s unofficial but highly encouraged exile. After trying out Belgium and England, Hugo decided the Channel Islands were the way to go, and waited out Napoleon III’s reign in Hauteville House.

Victor Hugo was a committed Romantic in all things, and this informed many aspects of his life… among them his decorating decisions. He structured the three main floors of his house as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. His wife and daughter got to live in Hell, while his sons at least got to stay in Purgatory. He reserved Heaven for himself. He did, however, let his neighbors take a peek into Heaven by adding onto his floor a “look-out” made entirely of glass. (NB: My tour guide told me that the neighbors had to “look out” at sunrise, when Hugo liked to take his bath in full view of the public. Neighbor and longer-term mistress Juliette Drouet wrote to Hugo, “What a privation it will be for me […] when I can no longer watch you in the mornings, walking about your house!” I don’t think anyone else shared her opinion.)

13 Comments

Children’s Stories Made Horrific: The Little Mermaid

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Books Mar 11, 2015

Previously in this series: The Beauty and the Beast. Original text by Hans Christian Andersen.

There are kings who live underneath the sea as well as above it. Kings have daughters there too, in the manner of kings everywhere, and fathers there must find something to do with them as well as we do. There is no place so remote that no man can settle and own it. There was a king once, who owned the sea and lived in it, and he filled it with his daughters, and he owned them too.

Each of the young princesses had a little plot of ground in the garden, where she might dig and plant as she pleased. They did not own it, but they could use it. Women own nothing, but may have the use of many things. And the youngest of the princesses built her garden in the shape of the sun, and filled it with flowers as red as the sky at sunset. She was a strange child, and could not keep her eyes or her thoughts to herself.

77 Comments

Texts From Blanche DuBois

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Books Mar 11, 2015

stella
stella its your sister blanche
your sister from before, with mom and dad
Blanche!
my God
it’s so good to hear from you
it’s been ages
yeah probably

28 Comments

In Which Three Adults Discuss A Wind in the Door Seriously and at Length

Johannah King-Slutzky and Joe Howley Books Mar 09, 2015

What happens when you revisit the woefully misremembered science fiction of your youth? Joe Howley (Latin teacher) and Johannah King-Slutzky (internet wraith) asked adults to re-read their genre favorites from childhood. For the second in our Time Quartet series, we talked to bona fide adult Julia Wetherell, a radio producer for Playing on Air and one of the developers of the upcoming Autostraddle podcast. We spoke with Julia via Gchat about how A Wind in the Door initiated her into dramas of the unseen, our permanent fascination with mitochondria, and why Proginoskes is the series’ dearest sassy gay friend. (The following conversation has been gently massaged for clarity.)

Previously: Our interview with archaeologist Kate Franklin about A Wrinkle in Time.

JOHANNAH: Hi, everyone here?

JOE: Well hello there!

JULIA: Hi!

JOHANNAH: Alright, Julia, can you tell us a little about your professional (or personal, if you want) background?

JOE: Julia: who the heck are you.

JULIA: I’m a radio producer and I do a couple of things. I’m the associate producer of Playing on Air, which is a public radio program/podcast for contemporary short theater, so I edit a lot of radio plays and interviews, and get to work with actors and playwrights. I’ve also done radio feature work, mostly for Studio 360. I also do random freelance work, which is sometimes boring, and sometimes awesome! Such as, right now I’m on a team developing a new podcast for Autostraddle.com. And I’m a hobbyist science fiction writer.

JOE: When did you first encounter this book, and have you read it many times since then?

JULIA: I think my grandma gave me all of the Wrinkle in Time books when I was, say, 7? 8?

JOE: Solid grandmaing.

JULIA: Yeah, she was really good at passing on the subtly Judeo-Christian fantasy literature, which I appreciated a lot. I don’t explicitly remember reading any of them more than once, but I must have. At least the first one. And honestly, A Swiftly Tilting Planet might be my favorite — or at least the one that I thought about the most when I was nine years old. But for some reason A Wind in the Door jumped out at me when Johannah mentioned doing this. And it is 100% because of the mitochondria and the farandolae.

42 Comments