American literature

Too Much Technology?

Pop Lit Fiction

2024 or 1984?

DO PEOPLE EVER CONSIDER that George Orwell’s novel 1984 was set forty years ago, that we live in a dystopia but it’s more benign albeit subtle and insidious than Orwell’s vision, creeping incrementally but steadily into every minute aspect of our lives? We’re proverbial frogs in a pot of water only the water is 95% boiled and no one’s noticed. Thoughts provoked by our new feature story, “What Does It Cost to Be Civil?” by Tom Ray, about an ordinary couple in an ordinary community who just haven’t quite adapted, yet, to the changing conditions of the world we live in now. Anyone who was bombarded during the recent election campaign by texts and phone messages from hosts of strange numbers will definitely get it. Enjoy!

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am Albert. When you answer a call from me you become argumentative sometimes. Other times, when you’re on your laptop and have YouTube open, you play ’25 or 6 to 4’ by Chicago for me. That’s funny. Why that song, I wonder? And you know about spoofing, which you’ve explained to people who’ve called your number.”

He exhaled. “I thought you were a computer. If somebody answers, you transfer the call to a real person.”

“Oh, I am a computer, but I’m a person, too.”

Art Perspectives

Pop Lit Fiction

AT NEW POP LIT we’ve long believed in creative innovation. Artistic, human innovation. Among new techniques holding great potential in the literary sphere is what we call multidimensional fiction: offering multiple viewpoints in a single work. A change from the omnipresent solipsistic “I”– sometimes called autofiction– which dominates so much literary writing today. By presenting several perspectives, you create a more rounded work. More realistic, to the extent it simulates our three-dimensional universe.

Which Becky Tuch does well in our new feature short story, “Where the Rivers Meet.” Appropriately, the story’s chief setting is an art museum– places which offer a variety of perspectives.

OUR purpose as a literary site is to offer different perspectives and exhibit the best writing we can find– to be a kind of literary gallery which readers can walk through, and discover in various rooms fresh techniques, new ideas, and stimulating word canvases. Maybe also, works which capture a particular moment in time, as with Becky’s excellent story. Check it out!

Forget the fact that Erika had risen from sales associate to store manager after over a decade of assiduous work, that she had dropped Bess off with a steady rotation of friends in order to attend countless trade shows around the country, that she had stayed continually up to date on what was being done in stores all over the world—wooden wave-shaped chairs in Amsterdam’s Kunst Museum, a floor made of sand in Malta’s Military Nautical History Museum, puzzles, posters, magnets featuring the unsung women of Impressionism. Forget the personalities Erika put up with, the snotty or distracted curators, the petulant or neurotic artists, all to coordinate exhibits inside the store, all so shoppers would have an experience.

Late Summer Musings

Pop Lit Fiction

LATE SUMMER in much of the country, if not the world, is a time of sunny days combined with cooling evenings. A sign that time moves on, all good things come to an end. Evening becomes not just a time for fading melancholy sunsets, but also wistfulness– which may, on occasion, lead into nostalgia. Nostalgia for what was, and may someday be again.

It’s in that spirit of latent nostalgia that we present a glimpse at the 1950’s in the form of a short story by Nick Gallup, “Growing Up Is Hard to Do.” A story about high schools and homecomings, ballroom dancing and football teams, with a touch of innocence and romance.

BUT– along with nostalgia for a brief moment in time free from the many turmoils, hectic pace and strife which mark the world and everyday life now, can we have nostalgia, perhaps, for a lost art? Namely, for short stories which connect with everyday readers, as they once did. As Nick Gallup said in a tongue-in-cheek “WARNING” note accompanying the text of his story:

If you’re looking for pretentious Master of Fine Arts BS, please look elsewhere. I didn’t catch my mother having sex with my uncle, nor do I believe I can go blind from excessive masturbation. So, don’t look for any deep emotional meaning in this story. It is intended to be self-effacing and hopefully evoke a laugh or two. If you’re looking for a literary experience, I suggest you fork over $200 and subscribe to “The New Yorker” and be bored out of your freaking mind. 

At New Pop Lit we believe that terrific short stories, if not necessarily “literary,” are literature. We could point to any number of past ones– the Saturday Evening Post stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald for instance, which were written strictly as entertainment. A good example being the Basil and Josephine stories, which carry a wistfulness, a sense of feeling, of humor and life, which transform them into art. If anything can be called art.

Nick Gallup has written some terrific stories. We hope you enjoy another example, which we’re pleased to publish.

February Fiction

Pop Lit Fiction

CREATIVITY: What is it? Sometimes it’s presenting a new way of looking at things, a new angle, new viewpoints. Merging genres or mixing styles. Or contrasting, as with our new feature story– “Molasses” by Bud Sturguess— comedy and tragedy. A look at the Titan submersible disaster of 2023 and reactions to it. The story is really about: us. Humanity, with all our flaws, quirks, ambitions and foolhardiness which make us the unique– or uniquely foolish– creatures we are.

Creativity is the goal of this project. Which means offering entertainment to readers, but at the same time, varied vantage points on art, life, writing. Anyway, we hope you enjoy the story!

Whenever I heard of the Great Molasses Flood, I used to grin and think, “how do you not outrun molasses?” It must have looked like a scene from Ghostbusters II, the evil slime oozing down streets and tunnels. I mean, molasses is used as a metaphor for slowness; how could anybody fail to escape a “flood” of it? Or did big fat globs of syrup rain down from the sky and trap whoever they landed on, like a mosquito in an amber fossil?

XXX

ON OTHER FRONTS, we hope to soon revive our Open Mic blog, with new ideas planned for it. In the meantime, we’re offering a short, energetic piece of music there by Ben Macnair: “Fat Chaffinch.” A signal of the energy which will be coming to this site.

Why Pop Lit?

Announcement

WHY?

Why read our web site?

Why “pop lit”– an intended fusion of the literary and the popular?

If you’re interested in writing and literature and believe literature can change the world (which at the moment needs an upsurge in cultural enthusiasm), then we’re a literary site to keep an eye on. None are more ambitious. (A sign of absurd confidence?)

What makes us stand out is A.) We believe the literary art, as well as the publishing industry itself, will change. As arts over time inevitably change. B.) We have plans to change it. Plans-– the plural, because we know many if not most of our ideas won’t work. Which is why we have a lot of them. We’re the innovation machine of today’s literary world.

This means: creating prototypes.

We have a primitive “3-D” multidimensional short story as our current feature, as one example of a writing prototype. We also have “zeens”– print journal prototypes– available for sale at our POP SHOP, in addition to the latest issue of a newsletter discussing more of what our plans are about.

Jump on the New Pop Lit bandwagon before it takes off!

Stalking a Writer

Feature

WHERE ARE THE WRITER CELEBRITIES?

THERE HAVE BEEN a few of them over the years, even recently, as we find with our atmospheric new feature set in Manhattan, “That Time I Stalked Nick Tosches” by Brooklyn-based author Scott Laudati.

We wish we could’ve met Nick Tosches ourselves!

The Next Best Thing: To discover or create a few new literary celebrities. Which may be part of what this hyper-ambitious project is about. Until then, enjoy the essay.

“He’s a writer,” I said. “These guys don’t get the face time. They don’t hate their fans like actors do.”

It was a gamble, though. Would he dig a young fan interrupting his drink? There was a war in every line on his face. I hadn’t seen anyone else recognize him, but maybe that’s why he drank there. There was no way to know if he’d shake my hand or put his cigar out on my eye.

XXX

(Painting: “Portrait of Victor Chocquet” by Paul Cezanne.)

What Does New Writing Look Like?

Pop Lit Fiction

THIS IS a question we hope to ask more often in coming months and perhaps provide answers– with the knowledge the short story is marginalized in the culture or at least fallen from its once-lofty station one hundred years ago when everyone in America was reading them and new story writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald were celebrities.

WILL the art become like string quartets or live theater– property of a set group of Insider cognoscenti based in select artistic capitals, with tiny groups of imitators scattered across the country, sharing their sacred texts like monks keeping an archaic cultural form scarcely alive? In what ways can it change? Is its regeneration doable– can a few Dr. Frankenstein mad scientists in artistic laboratories generate electricity through the monster’s body, and thereby rejuvenate it?

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We don’t know. Odds against the idea are steep. We only know that in future days we’ll be looking for stories which look different. Which try new things, no matter how offbeat or quirky.

TODAY we present a short story which looks and sounds different from the norm, “The Age of Insomnia” by Christopher Landrum. Not a linear story so much as a painting you look at and try to take in as one impression, with allusions to law, to literature, and to maybe the short story itself.

Father was a lawyer. The idea that all the cases and statutes of the law can be read together as some grand story sounds like a childish cliché—but what I wonder these nights is, can a story somehow be law? 

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WE HAVE other thoughts about art and the short story in a post at our NPL News blog, here.

ALSO be sure to see what we’re doing new with our print issues, here.

What Are Zeens?

News

INVENTING THE NEW

Zeens are a book-zine hybrid, with roots in the print-zine scene of the 1990s, taken to a whole other level of quality and design.

Zeens are a totally new product unlike anything before seen.

Zeens are a way to rejuvenate the literary game– a path toward connecting intelligent people from all spheres to the joys of literary reading.

Zeens are instantly attractive, accessible, and appealing, modestly packaged yet wonderfully colorful. They shout, “Take me, read me, collect me!”

They’re like finding a glowing treasure, the unexpected gift.

Purchase your zeen here, today.

ZEENS!

Announcement

A NEW KIND OF PUBLICATION

The book is dead. Or at least, the word itself turns off more than half of the potential audience, because they associate it with word-clotted unexciting tomes packaged in volumes reeking of dust and stodginess.

Time to rethink the package– and the product itself. Which is what we do in our latest “zeen” journal/fanzine hybrid, Extreme Zeen 2. Worth a look for the adventurous. Buy it here. Try out the New– soon to be the NOW. (We’ll be surprised if upon receiving it you don’t say, “Wow!”)

Until then, read the story behind the publication, “The Story of Extreme Zeen.”

The Pre-Breakthrough Moment?

Opinion

WE DON’T KNOW if we’ll be the ones to punch a hole in the culture which talented-but-undiscovered writers can jump through. But we know someone will, and soon. There are too many outsider writers better than those in the established New York-based literary order for artistic upheaval not to occur.

LOCATIONS

That there needs to be alternate centers of literary and publishing activity to the New York monolith, in other parts of the country, is stating the obvious. The way to do this is by creating better literary products along with inexpensive ways of producing those products.

VEHICLES

For us, it’s all or nothing. Breakthrough at some point or fold up shop.

Our chief tool to achieve our objectives is a new literary product which we’ve been calling–

THE 3–D SHORT STORY

When’s the last time someone seriously tried to reinvent one of the standard literary forms? 

Allen Ginsberg did it with his poem “Howl.” A long time ago.

Gordon Lish tried to do it with his unique minimalist take on the short story as featured  from 1987 to 1995 in his literary journal, The Quarterly— which included the likes of Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Diane Williams, and many others.

the quarterly

A worthy attempt. But his writers and their writing were too restrained, too tame– they didn’t go nearly far enough with their aesthetics or their imaginations.
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OUR attempt at Artistic Breakthrough begins on June 6th, 2019. Word will occur here as soon as one of the completed stories is posted. 3–D Day IS coming.

giacomo balla street light

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(Art: “New Planet” by Konstantin Yuon; “Streetlight” by Giacomo Bala.)