Month: December 2014

Pushcart Prize Announcement

Announcement

Greetings New Pop Lit’ers! Instead of a story today, we’re announcing our nominees for the 2015 Pushcart Prizes!

This was somewhat of a bittersweet process for Karl and me, because we publish what we feel are exceptional stories and Pushcart only allows six nominations per publication. Because of this limitation, we’ve chosen six stories that represent a variety of writing styles. Our 2015 nominees are:

1) Jessie Lynn McMains; Insect Summer
2) Thomas Mundt; Placeholder
3) Kathleen Crane; Donnie Darko
4) Pablo D’Stair; Yellow is the Color of My True Love’s Hair, in the Morning
5) Ian Lahey; The Janitor
6) Andrea Gregovich; The Unshakable Kayfabe of Tommy Rage

Congratulations, nominees and congratulations to our other writers who helped us make NPL happen in 2014! More great things to come!!

 

 

Portrait of Santa Claus, by Thomas Nast, Published in Harper’s Weekly, 1881. Photo image obtained/rendered by Gwillhickers. Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Aftertaste

Third-Way Fiction

A ghost story today, readers. Not a scary ghost story, but a story of reflection and resolution by author Edward Ahern— enjoy Aftertaste!

 

It began with the toilet seat. It was down. Roger never left the toilet seat down– it had been one of the sore points with Joyce before she divorced him. He squinted early morning eyes and propped the seat back up.

His cell phone beeped as he slid a razor down his cheeks. Roger glanced at the heading –a message from Joyce’s sister. He finished shaving, wiped his face, and looked at the text, a broadcast to about twenty people. Joyce was dead. He called the sister without putting the phone back down.

Beyond Hypocrisy: The n+1 Story

Opinion

Hear ye, hear ye!

Spoiled rich girl Dayna Tortorici just impaled n+1 on a watermelon!

Dayna made editor at n+1, yet she doesn’t know who Daniel Handler is and couldn’t care less about his racist jokes at the National Book Awards!

Is it possible that cronyism could lead to incompetence and hypocrisy?! I never thought that could happen either!

Fortunately, NPL editor Karl Wenclas is here to make sense of the insane literary world and speak truth to power in his scathing editorial, Beyond Hypocrisy.

To survive in the high-priced, high-cost world of New York publishing, literary individuals are forced into a schizophrenic mindset.

On the one hand they’re required to be correctly liberal in their attitudes, if not Leftist. On the other hand they’re placed at the center of power and money in the richest, most capitalist city on the planet. Within the pyramid of hierarchy that defines that city, the realm of literature exists at the highest levels. As the recent swanky black-tie National Book Awards dinner demonstrated.

Thanks to usatoday.com for Daniel Handler image.

Placeholders

Third-Way Fiction

Happy St. Nick’s Feast Day, New Pop Lit’ers! You made it!

This week our Saturday Story happens to fall on a joyous day in Central Europe: all the good kids who weren’t eaten by Krampus last night get extra special treats!

In the spirit of the day, NPL presents survivors with this wicked story by Chicago writer Tom Mundt, titled Placeholders. Enjoy!

 

This is about the time my skull got whaled upon by an anonymous assailant who will likely remain an enigmatic shadow until end times or the completion of the Chicago Police Department’s battery investigation, whichever comes first.

 

2001-kubrick-iphone