Indie Lit Round-Up: What to Read This Weekend [Vol 8: Jun 22]

The Coil editor rounds up the best literary pieces from the indie Internet for you to read this weekend.

There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet to read. Here, let me help you wade through the crap to get to the good stuff. This recurring column features stories, reviews, poems, interviews, essays, and literary whatnot that you might have missed, and you can come back every weekend for new great reads.

“I saw a woman outside the grocery store, Supremo on 43rd, with bowed hips, cocked in the way I really like — puffer jacket open exposing bits of feather stuffing — and a smooth navel soft with downy hair, rigged into sloping sextant hip points.” | JANE-REBECCA CANNARELLA talks about dessert and body image in “Pendulum Pastry” at Jellyfish Review.

“Like most people, a majority of my time online is spent either replying to emails or waiting for someone to email me back or wading through a metric ton of reply-all messages because someone decided to cc everyone with a meme I’ve already seen a thousand times on Twitter.” | KRISTEN ARNETT talks privacy in the library in “Librarians Will Guard Your Privacy with Their Lives” in Literary Hub.

“Good, safe, polite: you know, you remember. You come close.” | KRISTINE LANGLEY MAHLER talks erasure in “The Rules” on Atlas + Alice.

“There’s a moment in Beyoncé and Jay Z’s video for ‘Apes**t,’ about two minutes in, when Bey stands in formation in front of the painting The Coronation of Napoleon.” | KAITLYN GREENIDGE talks about reclaiming the meaning in the artifacts museums have stolen for centuries from different cultures in “In the Louvre, Beyoncé Proves There’s Power in Repurposing Art History” in Glamour.

“The tough girls stand in the bathroom, applying Lee press-on nails.” | CHELSEA VOULGARES earns her learner’s permit in “Hotbox” on New World Writing.

“Peter Frumkin lives in Barrington, Illinois with three dogs, two cats, a bird named Dorothy and his lovely girlfriend who will grow to love animals.” | JOSH DENSLOW tells a humorous (and somewhat tragic) story of a life in writer bios in “Bio” at Flash Flood.

“All that summer my brother, Kevin, padded around the house in the Pink Panther costume my aunt had made him for his birthday: pink pajamas for the body and a matching tie for the tail.” | TIFF HOLLAND delights with a brief flash piece, “Ending Up in the Ditch,” at New World Writing.

“At a news conference in 2008, Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, announced that the Arctic sea-ice cover was ‘in a death spiral.’” | ASHLEY SHELBY has a great list of climate books to wake you the fuck up in her Shortlist, “To The Poles — Before They Started Melting,” at The New York Times.

“I was coming from meeting my ex-girlfriend for beers, or to return our stuff, or maybe it was for closure.” | AL KRATZ talks about closure and understanding in “Serve and Protect Yourself” on Hobart.

“Someone once asked me, what are the words I do not yet have — ” | TANAYA WINDER talks about sexual assault of Native women in the gripping poem, “Missing More Than a Word” at Poetry Foundation.

Did you love a literary piece on the Internet this week? Tweet it to me at @leahangstman, and my DMs are always open for new ideas.

LEAH ANGSTMAN serves as Editor-in-Chief for Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and a proofreader for Pacific Standard. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, Slice Magazine, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Find her at her website.