Links: The Toast, Crime Novels, and a Congratulations!

Happy Wednesday! I am back on U.S. soil with a sickness that I could have only gotten from being trapped in a plane with germs and strangers for several hours. But on the bright side, there’s nothing cute guys love more than a wet, hacking cough.

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This is The Toast‘s last week and I’m very sad to see it go. NPR wrote a touching goodbye to the site and I may or may not have teared up a little:

The Toast appealed to our most interesting selves — bookish, queer, into medieval art or Shakespeare, anti-pretentious, shamelessly emotional. The Toast bet that its readership was smart, and that weird passions, beautifully presented, were just as relatable as the trilling, manic prose of women’s magazines.

Thankfully, the site will remain up so users can access its archives, but no new content will be produced. Let’s pour one out for The Toast, y’all! Feel free to post some of your favorite Toast pieces in the comments.

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I’m dedicating this next link to Elyse, given her love of crime novels. The Atlantic recently published an article on why women are writing the best crime novels and it’s a long and thorough dive into the genre:

In so many of the crime stories they’ve been writing, the sense of loss is overpowering. People die or go missing, of course, because that’s the genre, but it’s more than that. The crimes in novels like French’s The Secret Place and Abbott’s You Will Know Me and Marwood’s The Darkest Secret come to represent some larger absence, a hole in the coherence of the world. In Sunset City, a striking first novel by Melissa Ginsburg (another poet), the murder of a high-school friend sends the young heroine into a self-destructive spin. In emotional free fall, she says to herself, “There were no boundaries anywhere”—which could be the motto of all the lost girls in today’s crime fiction.

I especially loved the way it compared how men handle conventions crime fiction compared to women.

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Author Lois Duncan passed away earlier this month and I’m sure many of us have picked up one of her young adult suspense novels at least one. The New Republic has a lovely tribute to the late author:

These books understood that girls of a certain age grapple with changing bodies, hidden longings, raging desires, and quaking needs. Duncan went even further, understanding that young girls also feared what those emotions could do, both to themselves and to those around them. Mysterious forces act on the heroines of Duncan’s books, as their developing adolescent personalities become the ideal vessels for ghosts, specters, and otherworldly phenomena. Kit, the heroine Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall (1974), is isolated in a spooky, Gothic boarding school by phantoms real and imagined, compelled beyond control to act as amanuensis for dead authors such as Emily Brontë.

Any of you have fond memories of a Duncan book? Do you have a favorite?

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Lastly, we want to extend a big “heck yeah” to our very own Carrie for being included in Speculative Fiction 2015:

Edited by Foz Meadows and Mark Oshiro, Speculative Fiction 2015 collects over fifty pieces of online commentary on SFF from all corners of fandom. The articles included here have been specially and carefully curated by the editors to celebrate diversity and change, showcasing the best of SFF in its many forms.

The collection is due out sometime this summer with proceeds going to Room to Read.

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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!