Recommended Reading From Online Magazines

Another week of living, another week of reading.

Here are four stories we think will read when you live them.

Enjoy.

– The firewood he piles like bricks, building a barrack. I would never try to push it over. It is humiliating to be defeated by objects. Some things, you can see how solid they are; you don’t need to touch. Others look soft but resist. Still others look soft and are soft, and that is a disappointing thing. Such things let you fall along a slippery trail for years with nothing to block your way. — Kathryn Scanlan in The Collagist

– In 1951, William Burroughs was living in Mexico City with his common-law wife, Joan. They had gone to a party, and we don’t know what kind of drugs were there, but Burroughs was feeling good. Not just good, he was feeling invincible. He announced that he and Joan would perform their “William Tell act.” Joan walked behind a low white sofa and stood against the far wall. It was a white wall, not too far from a door. The people at the party who’d been drinking and talking stopped talking. They stood up and moved away. Burroughs held his gun, a revolver.  — John Haskell in Salt Hill Journal

– On that day, the king had been down among the offices of the clerks, discussing with my superiors the possibility of constructing a massive bridge over a broad river—a convenience that would have allowed him quicker access to the woods to the north of the palace. An avid hunter, the king was insistent on the matter even after my superiors had explained to him the different ways in which such a project would have been a financial impossibility. The debate over the bridge was an intense one, though my superiors were forced to proceed with the humility that their duty often demands of them, beginning each point and counterpoint by saying, “Of course your highness is wise enough to realize” and “it could not possibly have escaped your majesty’s shrewdness . . .” – Seth Fried in Tin House

– When I was coming up, what we knew about chiggers we heard through the grapevine: our mothers and fathers, true, but mostly our grandmothers and great aunts. They were the source of that kind of lore. Chiggers, they said, would feast on your blood. They liked, most particular, my Great Aunt Ida would say, the flesh of little boys. The smallest sinners. They liked to burrow in right around the elastic of little boys’ underwear, getting close, close as possible to the family jewels. — Amy Pence in Dogzplot