Recommended Reading From Online Magazines

Have you read Android Karenina or Jane Slayre? Do you feel comfortable knowing registered nurses can take care of you from the comfort of their own homes? Come on, seriously: did you think the Texas Rangers could do it, get to the ALCS against the Yanks, with their fans sporting foam antlers and claws? Did you wonder about a thirty-fourth miner in Chile on Tuesday, still stuck down there? If the world’s a ship and the pulpit its prow, then the john must contain the waters of sweet salvation, right?

Good. You’re ready. Take a deep breath. Yell “CHI-CHI-CHI-LE-LE-LE!” if you want to. It’s all good. Then read these. And if your soul gets thirsty after that, don’t drink out of the toilet. Say a prayer. It’s not as messy.

– The only thing to do is get out of New York. It takes nearly two train hours through the Bronx spray-paint smog and loopy Yonkers’ racetracks to get where the sun springs bright above the whole Hudson watercourse, and when I see it I thank God for this wide shimmering bowed river bend spreading spacious through eroded hillscapes like some secret inland ocean. — Adam Moorad in Blue Lotus Review

– She pulled the blinds close. Turned away the well-wishers with their tightly woven baskets of advice. Dressed the boy in pajamas the colors of Easter eggs. Picked at the yellowish scales that covered his bumpy little head. Observed that nothing tasted or looked the same. — Michelle Reale in Negative Suck

– I wake up. It is morning and I look over toward the hamster cage. I see the caramel fluff but it is not twitching. I stretch and yawn and saunter over. Poke it in the side with my finger but it does not move. –Ani Smith in Titular

– When I was four years old, my mother and I left Mississippi to escape my father. This was after he’d dislocated her shoulder, cracked her ribs, and broken her nose twice. We started in Birmingham; then we went to Pulaski, Tennessee, then up to Chicago, then down to Little Rock, then up again to Fairfield, Iowa, and then down again to Raytown, Missouri, where we finally settled after my father got remarried when I was eleven. If you connect the dots on a map, it looks like an M that’s missing half of one of its legs. — Lisa Tucker in Gulf Stream

– Walt is one of those fake uncles that a lot of people have. He and my grandpa met during Vietnam; the only brown guys in their unit, they were fast friends. Walt even defended my grandfather, a Pacific Islander, when the other soldiers ridiculed him for his Asian features. He did the same for my sister, who in seventh grade was followed home by two boys chanting “Chinese slut! Chinese slut!” I was too busy stewing over it to actually do anything. — Francisco Q. Delgado in Temenos