Home » Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading: “Help Is on the Way” by Wendy Elizabeth Wallace

Apple Valley Review Spring 2026 literary magazine cover image

There is always something a little magical about stories that invite us to make assumptions only to quietly turn those assumptions on their heads. What seems obvious at the outset proves to be something entirely different by the end, making the emotional payoff all the more poignant. That kind of narrative confidence requires a careful balance of misdirection and honesty, and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace achieves it beautifully in “Help Is on the Way.”

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace’s “Help Is on the Way” begins with a familiar winter disaster: a driver has crashed into the utility pole outside the narrator’s house. As she rushes out to help, she continually measures herself against Ryan, the former partner who always seemed to know exactly what to do when accidents happened on the dangerous curve outside their home.

At first, Wallace encourages readers to assume Ryan is gone because of tragedy. Instead, Wallace gradually reveals a far messier and more human truth. Through a series of increasingly awkward interactions with the injured driver, we learn that the narrator’s loneliness is self-inflicted: Ryan left after she cheated on him, and she is struggling with the consequences of that loss. Her attempts to recreate Ryan’s warmth and competence only expose the gulf between who she wants to be and who she is.

The story’s painful climax arrives when the narrator realizes she never called 911—a basic step Ryan always handled. Even after the accident victim leaves in frustration and emergency responders finally arrive, the narrator clings to Ryan’s reassuring text message despite recognizing its hollowness. Wallace crafts an uncomfortable, compassionate portrait of self-deception, regret, and the desperate hope that next time we might become the person we wish we already were.

Read the story in the Spring 2026 issue of Apple Valley Review.

Recommended Reading, curated by Managing Editor Nicole Foor, is one of the many features included in our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to receive new issues of literary magazines, book releases, bookstore updates, writing prompts, and submission opportunities, all delivered straight to your inbox.

Recommended Reading: Identity, Gender, and Becoming in “Unbound” by A.D. Nauman

A.D. Nauman’s “Unbound” begins like a ghost story, or perhaps a childhood hallucination brought on by abandonment, when the narrator’s father leaves in 1972 and a piano begins to play by itself in the night. But what unfolds is something much larger: a coming-of-age story that interrogates identity, gender, desire, and the cost of forcing oneself into a shape that never quite fits.

Beryl’s relationship with Masha is especially revealing. The two are drawn together because they are both “strange”—outsiders in a world that rewards sameness. Beryl clings to Masha not just out of friendship but out of recognition, a sense of shared difference. Yet even here, identity proves unstable. Beryl tries to make sense of her feelings using the limited language available to her, wondering if she is “homo,” even as her desires resist easy categorization—split between her fascination with boys and the intimacy she shares with Masha.

There’s an irony in the fact that the Quaker school, ostensibly unconventional, becomes a place of relative acceptance, while the larger social world continues to enforce rigid norms. Over time, that tension sharpens: Masha eventually embraces her identity and, in doing so, becomes legible—almost “normal” within a framework that can now name her. Beryl, however, remains caught much longer in that in-between space, unable to fully inhabit any category offered to her.

As the story moves forward, Beryl tries on versions of herself—performing femininity, shaping herself into something recognizable—while the presence of Albert (a remnant of those earlier years when she and Masha claimed to be inhabited by spirits) persists as a deeper truth she cannot fully articulate. Only decades later does she claim it outright: “I’m a gay man in a female body.” What makes “Unbound” so compelling is not just this realization, but the long, uneven path toward it—where belonging is always provisional, and identity resists even the categories that seem, for others, to offer clarity.

Read the story in the Summer 2026 issue of Northwest Review.

Recommended Reading, curated by Managing Editor Nicole Foor, is just one part of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get new lit mags, books, bookstore updates, inspiration prompts, and submission opportunities delivered straight to your inbox.

Recommended Reading: Poems on Love, Time, and Aging

If you haven’t subscribed yet to our weekly newsletter (seriously—what are you waiting for?), you can dive into this week’s recommended reading here. Selections come mainly from literary magazines and websites and are curated based on Managing Editor Nicole Foor’s tastes.

“Burning Juniper” by Bruce McRae

There’s something in the language and word choices of Bruce McRae’s “Burning Juniper” that feels like an old-time spell—talk of witches, warding off evil, summoning something protective—yet it unfolds alongside a relationship rendered with striking intimacy. The poem seems to hover at a point of farewell, arriving at that surprising, almost offhand “when o’clock in the fare-thee-well,” even as it insists on a love that feels boundless: someone the speaker would “wed every day for a year. / Infinite love. Eternal honeymoon.” That juxtaposition—of enchantment and ending, of something slipping away and something that feels like it should last forever—gives the poem its quiet charge.

Read the poem in the Spring 2026 issue of Bloodroot.

“The Horror of Forward Motion” by John Grey

As we get older, when more and more time comes to stand between youth and the present, you can’t help but feel how brutal forward motion can be. John Grey captures that unease perfectly in “The Horror of Forward Motion.” Unlike wine, not everything improves with age; relationships fray, and our own bodies begin to betray us. Grey gives that erosion shape in lines like, “From afar, your friends / speak well of who you were. / What use is that? / What was laughter / thirty years ago is silence now.”

The poem insists on movement as something inescapable and indifferent—time as a force you can’t negotiate with, only endure. Even memory becomes a burden, something “large, a dead weight,” always ahead of you, something you stumble over rather than return to. It’s a stark, unsettling meditation on aging, where the past is no longer accessible comfort but a kind of obstruction, and forward motion offers no relief, only continuation.

Read the poem in The Coffee Shoppe Literary Magazine.

Recommended Reading: “Radiator Reading” by Dale Scherfling

Do you ever read a piece and think, that sounds a lot like my childhood? Granted, I would be outside sledding down hills in winter, building snowmen and snow forts—unlike the narrator—but I also spent a fair amount of time indoors, nose buried in a book.

Scherfling does an excellent job setting the scene: a boy with his feet resting on a radiator, lost in stories that carry him far away—the San Francisco Bay instead of the Lake Erie shoreline. The sense of transport feels immediate and familiar, but what lingers is how real those imagined places become. The boy may see his own life as mundane, but he reshapes what he knows into something larger—imagining himself in those distant settings, drinking pop while the adults drink cheap beer and whiskey, filling in the gaps with details from his own world. Even the differences matter: where his Ohio fog arrives all at once, in San Francisco it rolls in slow and theatrical.

And anyone who has spent time in a library knows another detail he captures perfectly: the scent. That musty paper smell. Old leather. Dust. It doesn’t take much description to bring it all back.

By the end, the piece opens outward in a quiet, surprising way. The boy isn’t just imagining other lives—he begins to wonder if someone, somewhere, might be imagining his. It’s a small turn, but a powerful one, reminding us how easily we become part of someone else’s imagined world, just as vividly as they become part of ours.

Read the story in iExile, a journal coming back after a long hiatus.

Recommended Reading, curated by Managing Editor Nicole Foor, is just one part of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get new lit mags, books, bookstore updates, inspiration prompts, and submission opportunities delivered straight to your inbox.