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

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On The Road To Nowhere

Currently we’re moving from a small house to a big house, which means inconvenience and promise. In the past two days we’ve lugged boxes by the dozen and divorced rugs that’d been married to cobwebs, books frosted in inches of dust and bathroom items that to this day forget their purpose. Despite all this, by writerly news, we’ve got you covered. Hollywood has Bollywood and authors have the New Times of India, which spices up the work of Nanden Sen. Elsewhere, legalese permeates the New Republic, Norman Mailer gets the Huff, and from the grave Tolstoy digests his treatment in the Times Online.  John Lanchester reminds us why we love money, Daniel Nester is interviewed by Bookslut, and Allen Ginsberg sees himself in a movie. It’s time to howl, people. — Kevin Murphy

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Take Us There

Wanderlust, within us it swells. To be sure, we’re happy where we live. But the allure and the promise of untold adventures, untold lands and untold cultures occasionally drives us into a frenzy. We need to visit Vietnam, tomorrow! Hey, let’s book a trip to Lisbon, like now! Why not travel to Budapest, Hong Kong, and Boise? Why? Because of all the boring and practical reasons, that’s why. But instead of struggling to toss off reality’s depressing blanket, we get comfortable, settle in with a book/laptop, and read. That’s right, people: Stories, poems, essays! They take us away — imagination, take flight. Here’s our frequent flier miles for this week. — Kevin Murphy

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An American ESL instructor in Spain can expect to use not American but British materials in the classroom. The textbooks, the handouts, the CDs and DVDs…all of these will be British. Because the UK is a member of the EU, British materials are both geographically and bureaucratically more accessible to Spain than American materials. So are British ESL teachers. The difference between the amount of paperwork required for a Brit to legally work in Spain (very little) and the amount of paperwork required for an American to legally work in Spain (boatloads) is astounding.  Point being, most ESL students in Spain study British spelling, British pronunciation, and British usage, and an American stepping in on the scene is advised to remember this, so as not to throw everything off and/or appear totally unqualified to be teaching English.

Americans can adjust readily enough to spelling disparities, to “colour,” “analyse,” “licence” and the like. As English speakers, we know not to get too attached to consistency and logic in spelling, and as American consumers, we have seen British spelling before, in marketing. “Towne” and “centre” come easily enough to me thanks to a strip mall back home named “Towne Centre,” which name for a strip mall is so absurd in so many ways that it cannot be easily forgotten.

Continue Reading Noted Abroad.

The meadow is rich
with the thunderhead in front, the dark
and violet swelling in the sky
on the verge of blooming or bursting,
you can’t decide, and renounce
to think of a flower, in this bounty,
summer’s outcrop, the unrestrained
brushstrokes of thick and tall
disheveled grass, on air swallowing
slash after slash.
And gnats now in a hanging dance,
this thin drumming on your forehead,
the air’s stare.
It’s a hurricane, maybe, getting ready.
But for now everything is still,
the knuckles of the olive trees,
the oaks in their quiet puzzle of leaves
and the haze of gnats, eternity
lingering in its hum.
And your mind that so easily runs,
anticipates the storm, with that usual
mixture of fear and joy,
the fresh air, the change, the new breath,
whatever, being simply unable
to stay here and here only
in the feat of the present,
accepting the gnats
that do not leave you.
______________________________

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice, Italy. He has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, they have been published in around four hundred literary magazines since 1999,  in theU.K, U.S. and elsewhere. His poetry collection, “Re-Emerging”, was published as an on-line book by Gatto Publishing in 2006.