Great new(ish) stories from around the Web. Forget work for a minute and read a story. It’s good for you.

– He orders his eggs like his battles, pitched. Eats them fast off the plate—fork, mouth, fork, mouth—with no condiments. Finishes them off with a room-temperature beer (learned that in Luxembourg). Picks up his hat. Stands tall and shouts, “Thank you, egg, this morning! You genius bastard do-your-damndest chicken coffin son-of-a-bitch!” Looks around and nods. Places his hat. Winks at a girl on a wall calendar. Marches outside. Salutes the sun, and if there is no sun, salutes a cloud in the shape of malaria. — Sean Lovelace in Hayden’s Ferry Review

– Give us two tickets as far south as we can go, we’d said at the train station. We expected to find beaches, like in the brochures, but there are only rocks and cement. We expected to bed the girls who walk down the boulevard outside the pension every morning, their legs tanned by the Adriatic sun, but they don’t understand a word we say. We expected to bar-hop for a week straight but all the taverns are packed with young men standing around tall tables, elbow-to-elbow, with Tito looking down from every wall. — Mike Herndon in the Literary Bohemian

– Things started to fall apart the year the girl was murdered up on Pig Road, little more than a rutted trail, and along it the charred remains of a pig farm that had burned down so many years before that no one remembered. My sisters and I played there, among those ruins, inside the blackened cement foundation, digging around for treasures: canning jars, leather shoes, pieces of cloth we folded and stuck in our pockets. — Cinthia Ritchie in Memoir (and)

– Brooding silence accompanied the Johnson family sitting at the kitchen table. Pete Jr. noisily slurped down diluted potato soup and chomped on crusty bread, but his gurgling stomach remained unappeased. Annabelle, his ten-year-old sister, crinkled her nose, morosely swished her spoon through the broth, and ate only a bit. Pa Johnson did not eat at all. His elbows rested on the table as he braided his fingers. The wrinkles on his brow deepened as he somberly looked at his son and said, “You’re nineteen and ready to be a man. It’s time you be gettin’ out to California and diggin’ for the gold they’re findin’ out there.” — Ilan Herman in Miranda Magazine

– Lydia had accepted immediately when Valerie called with the invitation, looking forward to the days in the woods and the chance to see Valerie again after so long. The last time they had gone to dinner with her and Les. “You don’t see her any more now that she’s taken a new job,” she had told Carter. He had shaken his head, unable to think of a way to get out of it, not sure he wanted to. — Walter Cummins in PIF Magazine

Rise Up!

Hey campers, it’s time to gather ’round the fire. It’s warm here, and pretty. Gaze into the flames. Watch them trail off into the sky, feel the warmth on your fingers, toes, face. Take hold of that feeling and now, open your eyes. Are you still in your office? You are? Damn it! Well, even if we don’t have the power to physically transport you from your cubicle, we can provide the literature news that takes your mind to other, better places. To wit: Ashbery does his Dickinson dance in the NY Times, Bookslut reviews The Cry of the Sloth, old school zines are trumpeted in The Rumpus and electronic publishing meets its grumpy forebears in the Wall Street Journal. Elsewhere, Dylan Landis gets his treatment in Bookforum, the New Criterion considers Pop Art and JG Ballard’s daughter writes her dad a moving obituary in the Guardian. Come with us, all ye forest dwellers. It’s time to set this Monday on fire. — Kevin Murphy

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