Author: newpoplit

Fiction Finale 2022

Pop Lit Fiction

THIS HAS BEEN an excellent year for us in terms of fiction, maybe our best. The goal for 2023 will be to top it.

This year we close with an amazing story from Nick Gallup, who consistently has given us amazing work, in part from a clear writing style and in part from a knowledge of people, combined with a sense of structure– setting up on the front end what will happen on the back end. As he does with “The Stenographer,” which is about history but also about today. Very much about today. Presented in an understated yet dramatic way.

For anyone who loves the short story and enjoys reading.

Mom told me that one of the things she regretted about her college years was she hadn’t taken stenography and typing before enrolling. Stenography, she explained, would’ve been an asset for taking notes during lectures. Typing, in turn, would have been a boon for preparing term-papers, as it was her experience that typed term papers received higher grades than those written even in the best cursive. Made sense to me, so I let her talk me into taking a secretarial course at night while I worked during the day.

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ALSO: Watch for our FUN POP POETRY Special Edition, soon available at our POP SHOP.

Art and the Actual World

Pop Lit Fiction

INSTITUTIONS MOVE SLOWLY, including those of the established literary world, while super-plutocrats like Elon Musk are able to move at lightning speed. Coming technological changes are upon us designed to make the human animal, including writers and artists, obsolete.

HOW do we oppose this?

For starters, with better art– art which emphasizes humans and the human and our interactions with the natural world around us.

WE HAVE such example in our new feature story, “The Slow Pace of Pardon” by Christopher Laurence, set in a cabin in the woods, concerning possible wolves, a dog, a family, a mysterious reappearance, and unwanted interlopers. Atmospheric and well-written– making for terrific reading.

“So, looks like this’s what’s been making those tracks.” he thought. He felt a kind of relief knowing he could remove from his deposit of worries the vision of a rabid, snarling wolf bounding up his path. It was just a poor dog some sad bastard must have let free at the start of winter, when he decided he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be feeding it anymore. He could tell it was thin, and hunger must have finally forced it to put fear aside and come out into the open, where its energy failed it finally, and dropped it on their doorstep.

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IN THE NEW YEAR we intend to do more to forestall our replacement by artificial devices concocted by diabolical billionaires bent on constructing an artificial cyber world of robots, brain implants, fake realities and other nightmares.


ALSO: Speaking of real-world reality, we’ll be releasing within days an alternate version of our latest “zeen” print publication. We’re calling it Fun Pop Poetry Special Edition. The zeen is a mere sample of what we’re gearing up to achieve: actual custom-made publications with countless combinations of colors and styles, to fit the reader’s personality. Is any other publisher large or small offering this? (Are any even imagining such a thing?) We’re determined to lead the world in literary innovation.

New Aesthetics, New Canons

Announcement

DO PEOPLE realize the enormous cultural-media changes now taking place?

One needs to step back and view the bigger picture to fully see the changes. Legacy institutions in steady decline. The rise of often-inadequate-if-not-insane upstarts.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN that a racist nonentity like Nick Fuentes, podcasting out of his mom’s basement while promoting crackpot ideas, can become a national figure?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN that the richest man on the planet buys the most effective social media tool and uses it to decide what will or will not become major news stories?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN that a once-prestigious institution like the British Film Institute comes up with a list of “100 Greatest” movies that’s 100% out-of-step with public taste– as if they’re out to deliberately marginalize/sabotage/dynamite themselves and all current established-and-approved film critics?

These signs mean there are ENORMOUS openings in the culture right now– the opportunity to rethink everything arts related. Which we’re doing in the literary field with new styles of publications, as well as changing the structure of the literary art itself. The good guys (us!) need to pre-empt the bad guys in these changes.

Stay tuned. Much is happening.

The Pop Mission

Pop Lit Fiction

AS WE enter the dwindling days of 2022, our thoughts turn toward our plans for the new year. Fresh ideas geared toward grabbing increased territory on the literary map. WHILE we’re not sure exactly how to accomplish that, beyond rough notes on strategy and tactics, we know that by necessity it means reliance on literary POP– readable writing which has clarity and intelligence. Toward that end we feature writers able to achieve that elusive mix. One of them being Bud Sturguess, whose new story– “No Romance On Mount Nebo”— we spotlight now. We hope you like it.

As friends will often do with friends, my friends decided it was time for me to hop back into the dating scene. I had no interest, but romance and relationships are among the things friends push on friends the most. Even more than narcotics. I’ve no statistics to back up this claim, but it seems to me friends are always selling friends the outlandish claim that “there’s somebody out there for everybody.”

National Novel Writing Month

Announcement

THE EDITORS of New Pop Lit Karl Wenclas and Kathleen M. Crane who are also writers will be discussing the creative process and the future of writers and writing AT the Trenton Veterans Memorial Library in Trenton, Michigan this Saturday, November 19, at 2 p.m.

On being a writer: WHY should a person invest the time in what might be considered by some an outmoded art form?

There are multiple answers to that “Why?” With clarity and energy we plan to present a few of those answers.

(Advance register by calling 734-676-9777.)

Beyond the Boundaries

Pop Lit Fiction

THE APPEAL of science fiction is the idea of testing the outer limits of science, technology– and of the imagination. To stimulate questions of “What if?” and “What then?” At its best, sci-fi combines creativity of ideas with creativity of writing. Such is the case with our new fiction feature, “DEDCOM-204” by Courtenay Schembri Gray, one of the most talented young writers on today’s literary scene. We hope you enjoy her offering.

What is life but a series of little deaths? Those impactful, perhaps traumatic moments that take a part of us, all in preparation for our eventual big death—the one we don’t return from. I like to visit mine, from time to time; at the facility on the edge of town. Dad loves to remember his adulthood; the time before—when a firefly was a glowing bug, rather than a moment in your life preserved in a jar.

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By the way, Ms. Gray also has a poem in our newest print publication, the ultra-collectible Fun Pop Poetry. Have you purchased your copy?

Thinking About Fiction Writing

Pop Lit Fiction

With National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) almost upon us, our thoughts turn to fiction writing. What’s the mark of a good writer? What characterizes a good novel or short story?

For decades, good writing has been thought to consist of a sequence of well-written sentences. This has been the doctrine pushed by writing programs and by all those on the “literary” end of the writing and publishing spectrum. The result has been bombardments of thick texts of grandiose lyrical sentences, pages upon pages of them, displays of endless virtuosity like a prog rock lead guitarist given a ten-minute guitar solo going nowhere, as a means of showing off, then he forgets to end it regardless and continues on and on until even the most indulgent listener has vanished.

What if the experts are wrong?

What if the key to writing great fiction is simply telling an amazing, wonderful, human, magical story?

Today we present an argument for the latter idea, with one of the best stories we’ve ever featured, “Tales Along Turtle Heart Road” by Zach Smith. A simple and unassuming narrative that will sneak up on you. Read it and see what we’re talking about.

Harry stopped under the bridge. There was police tape but no other sign of the event. He had no intention of duplicating the actions; he just wanted to see it. No, that wasn’t quite right; he didn’t want to see it, he needed to. He didn’t know why he started climbing up the hill toward the trestle bridge, and he didn’t know how far he would have gotten, but when he turned around, high on the steep overgrown hill, he looked down at his car and saw something familiar in the road.

Fun Pop Poetry Has Arrived!

Announcement

MUCH TALK is happening everywhere about the literary scene where it’s headed its obstacles and divisions, What To Do, Where To Go why wherefore what’s your ideology your stance your pose your attention to minutaie your perspective on world issues– this and that– while we at New Pop Lit can only say: ENOUGH! Our answer to literary critics our solution to gatekeepers traditional or contemporary is embodied in our newest print publication: FUN POP POETRY.

Why do you read?

Why does anyone reaD?

aS A DUTY? aN OBLIGATION? a task??

Or maybe possibly to be amused for a few minutes– or dazzled– to find escape from the insoluble unsolvable eternally mad world of problems??

(Craft?? What’s that?)

We seek to blow the doors off institutions, the prison houses of literature, the gates of the gatekeepers, with words to be read and remembered.

Order your copy here, now. All Color, every page. You won’t regret it.

The future of poetry has arrived.

Poetry Explosion!

Poetry

POETRY POETRY POETRY POETRY

At the moment we’re focused on all things poetry, as we await the release of our new poetry zeen– due within the next two weeks– which we believe will set a new standard for the production and presentation of the poetic art.

A literary journal? A book? A chapbook?

NO! None of the above. Instead, something entirely new and unique– a fusion of fun poems with art and design, words and colors that POP! off the pages.

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BEFORE THIS we indulge in a brief attack on Brutalist design and architecture, care of three poems by our own Kathleen M Crane, “Grand Mackerel Spa and Resort”— with the understanding that modernist design is difficult to do well, and works only if a lot of warm colors are involved. Ideally, Pop, day-glo colors!

Pre-fab flab floating flotsam hotel pool
Blank faced guests spoon their morning gruel

World In Collapse?

Pop Lit Fiction

WATCHING the News the past two or three years one has received the impression, message, point, sledgehammer emphasis of a world in total collapse, screens filled with scenes of war and riots, destruction of cities and lives– protests rebellions insurgencies marches hectic hysteria as media generates panic leading to more turmoil feeding more media coverage and– the real point– sustained ratings. Jobs for designated experts on all sides.

TODAY we present a story which conveys what’s been happening. The Chaos of NOW, well captured in “Report from the Capital” by Timothy Resau. Fiction which depicts today’s tumultuous vibe.

Resau’s story is like a modernist painting in which you can see what you want to see in it. No sides taken– only a portrait of contemporary reality.

In spite of the curfew, sniper fire, violence, and bloodshed, we went into the capital that night. No one was safe. The ambushing was constant; gunshots, it seemed, were being fired randomly. Everyone was a possible target. The limited radio and TV reports warned of certain danger. In short, chaos and anarchy prevailed. Law and order were not in place—not yet. Law and order had been removed or erased. Citizens were being asked to remain tuned to local media for updates.