Recommended Reading From Online Magazines

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

– Paul is in love with La Verónica. He copies verses from Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada and slips them into her green shoulder-bag. She, “La Veró”, sleeps with Paul when she is lonely. She tells me about his love-making sounds and how he tastes like sugar, but I’ve come to find that out on my own. — Fabienne François in anderbo

– Marie, who had only been in the house a couple of days, tried to stay out of it by hiding in the curtained-off bay window where they’d said she could sleep. But a big girl in braids and overalls named Sheila came over and yanked the curtain back. This was a collective, she said, and everybody had to participate. It even seemed that Marie’s vote was needed to break the tie over whether or not there should be household chores. Some people said she shouldn’t be forced to vote, that that was bourgeois and, as things went on, they urged her to refuse to vote. The other group agreed that, no, she shouldn’t be forced to vote, but that she should want to vote and she’d better. — Diane Simmons in Blood Orange Review

– I was reading a novel about every three or four days in the beginning and if I had any time between lessons I’d spend it at the Feltrinelli near the Scala. They had a good selection of American and English titles and as I bounced from stories as different as Endo’s The Sea and Poison to Coezee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I found that my tastes in literature were divided into two camps: the authors whose pessimistic vision of humanity presented me with disturbing moral questions and those who had a more “damn the torpedoes,” libertine approach to life. — John Hemingway in Fogged Clarity

– Every day for years he stands in the park near the courthouse making white things turn black for people passing by.  All he has to do is touch it and think about the miracle and the miracle happens.  A girl hands him her white patent-leather purse and viola! it’s black.  That goes nice with your blouse, he says.  A man gives him a newspaper and ta-da! all the white paper is now black, a whole newspaper of black pages. — Pir Rothenberg in Juked

– She wakes on a cot in the trauma unit. She sleeps there intentionally, in anticipation of the next critical patient. Some days, roused by the shuffle of footsteps, the cries of family members, she stands and a body takes her place on the cot and she works on resuscitation, knowing she is awake because she could dream nothing like this. — Anthony Marra in Narrative Magazine

– View the Recommended Reading Archives

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– Ed. Note: DSM is not affiliated with these publications. We merely appreciate the hard work being done by the authors and the editors and wish to bring more light to their efforts. Every Monday we present to our readers essays, poems and stories from other literary magazines. Our goal is to showcase the Web’s strongest writing, and also to serve as a literary hub for time-pinched, interested fiction enthusiasts. Meanwhile, throughout the week, we’ll continue to publish our own stories, interviews, and poems.