Surviving the Dally

News

Quite an event!

Detroit’s “Dally in The Alley” street festival has more authenticity than any music festival you’ll ever attend. A neighborhood block party gone out of control. Total DIY. No corporate sponsors. No Budweiser banners. No beer logos.

It’s also quite a bit less genteel than your garden variety New Yorker book festival with its bland Jonathan Franzen-style authors. The Dally takes place in Detroit after all. Not Manhattan or Brooklyn. We were one of the few literary outfits represented at the event. Our goal is to make pop lit as much a part of people’s everyday life as music– of which at the Dally there was a lot of.

Read our report on the Dally, and how we did at it, at our News blog here.

NEW POP LIT at the Dally!

Announcement

There will be a NEW POP LIT table at the famed Detroit “Dally in the Alley” street fair this Saturday. The Dally is one of the largest urban street fairs in the country– and because it’s in the Motor City, it’s the coolest, hippest, edgiest such fair anyplace.

What will we have for sale and on display?

-A limited number of copies of the NEW POP LIT prototype lit journal, which contains exciting writing fitting the new “Pop Lit” hybrid category. This is the most important debut of a literary periodical at least since Paris Review came out sixty-plus years ago. The difference is that our journal presents new ideas from outside the mainstream. See what the future looks like.

-Special Kathleen Crane “Aloha from Detroit” t-shirts promoting the Detroit punk-scene chronicler’s e-book collection of stories.

-A variety of zines created by the best underground writer in America, Jessie Lynn McMains. Here’s a prediction: Jessie will soon be recognized as the best short story writer in the country.

(AN ASIDE: Kathleen Crane and Jessie Lynn McMains both have stories in the NPL prototype.)

-Copies of the Dan “I’m not Picasso” Nielsen art-lit chapbook. Prose poems and amazing drawings. Talk about a collector’s item!

-Various other books and zines from terrific new “Pop Lit” writers.

All this in the setting of the colorful Dally in the Alley, THE most amazing organic-and-authentic art festival in the nation.

To top things off, I’ll be there in person. (At one time I was the most exciting and provocative literary performer anywhere to be seen– and may still be.) I’ll have my voice and possibly even my faux-craziness with me. If you’re at the Dally, stop by and say hi!

(Pictured: a past version of this editor at Jeff Potter’s ULA table during an early moment at a previous Dally.)

-Karl Wenclas