A bottle of water? Why do we use to illustrate our new feature a bottle of water? What does the story, “Past Present” by Lori Cramer have to do with a bottle of water?!
Read the quick tale about relationships/new husbands/ex-boyfriends/domestic crises and find out.
The next noise isn’t a knock at all; it’s a thump, a fist pounding against the door. I jump up from the couch.
The struggles of being an artist! We at New Pop Lit are down with that struggle. It’s never easy. Today we present a short story, “Breathe,” by David R. Gwyn, which examines the struggle for artistic expression and meaning with a simple but moving profile of a man who has returned to his art after many years away from it.
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This is an apt tale to run during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) when thousands of persons across the country take up the challenge of art and struggle to express themselves, with words. We’ll be doing a presentation on November 17th at the Troy Public Library in suburban Detroit in connection with NaNoMoWri. Stay tuned for more details! (In the meantime, enjoy David Gwyn’s story.)
The artist sits, hunched, watching the masses navigate the streets. The colorful fall day contradicts the pale stone structures of Rittenhouse Square. Like the others, this month has come and passed and still he sold nothing. With winter on its way, the season of possible sales closes rapidly.
Happy Halloween! We find ourselves without a new Halloween story to present to you– so we dug up from a literary crypt fragments of an unfinished slasher novel, like cut-up pieces of a corpse. The original idea was that the intellectual parts of the novel would be scarier than the scary parts. It’s about a city, a mayor, and his wife, and staff, and a series of murders with which they’re confronted. Read the excerpts here.
The resurrected novel notes anyway are an apt prelude to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which kicks off November 1st. We’ll be doing a presentation for NaNoWriMo in the Detroit area– more info to follow .
The finely-sharpened hunting knife filled the killer’s vision. Staring at the edge of the knife intoxicated him. The image carried resonances of barbarism. Violence and blood. To his warped mind, the killings were necessary, but they’d also become fun.
We’re authentic. Our roots are in the DIY zine scene. It’s why we occasionally publish stories from one of the best underground zine writers in America, “Fishspit.”
Also, we’re shameless. We enjoy promoting this site. We can’t help noticing the love for cats across the Internet. Cats are a pop phenomenon. We want in on it.
What happens when you cross a tough underground writer with a cat?
You get “The Cutest Cat That Ever Lived.”
Is it “Literature” with a capital L? We don’t know! But it is entertaining. And authentic. And heartwarming. Especially if you like cats!
I’ve seen thousands of kittens. I’ve volunteered at countless cat rescue shelters . . . so you know I’ve seen cats in my life. I grew up on a farm where at any given time there were 17-23 cats. I have seen cats! I guarantee you Pip was the cutest kitten that ever existed. Don’t you even try to tell me your kitten is cuter.
Our mission is to publish terrific fiction.
Today we present a short story, “Clarity,” from one of the best story writers around, Alex Bernstein. The title of his story is apt, because Bernstein writes with distinct clarity– clarity of thought and clarity of style, which makes him one of the sharper commentators on the American scene today, combining humor with understanding. See if you agree.
“Julie – you can’t be happy with that guy. He takes undead hair scraps from people’s armpits and buries them in their scalps! He makes beer in his living room! Is that what you want?”
Summer reading for Labor Day weekend– for the last lazy days of summer.
We’ve been obsessed with poetry of late. Fitting that our feature story, “No Faith to Lose,” would be– marginally– about a poet. But it’s really about traveling. No, it’s about a relationship. It’s about the choices we make in our lives. It’s a story that just is, a slice of life, and we see in it what we want.
AN Block stories have been appearing across the Internet. We thought we’d grab a good one for ourselves. Hope you like it!
“You have pictures of me wearing what?” she asked, the following week. “Lavender tinted glasses? Purple lipstick? I never turned on all that much, one puff made me loopy. Oh, right, and cough my guts up.”
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(Meanwhile our Fun Pop Poetry feature is hopping.)
OUR CHIEF INTEREST is in finding writing which pushes against the acceptable boundaries of the establishment literary/publishing world– and which blurs the lines between the “literary” and “pop.” Toward that end we’ve published work by new writers like Andrea Gregovich, and interviewed more established authors like John Colapinto, if their artistic interests in some way converge with ours.
With our new feature we bring both tracks together, as Andrea Gregovich reviews John Colapinto’s controversial novel Undone. Offbeat personality reviewing a different kind of offbeat personality? It’s a feature not to be missed.
Here’s the thing about the much-maligned male gaze, though: every now and again it hits upon something real.
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(Remember to stay current with our Fun Pop Poetry feature.)
The wild election season is heating up.
To celebrate the madness, we’re running a new short story by Washington D.C. Beltway expert Tom Ray– giving us an entertaining inside look at the struggles staff handlers and party officials go through trying to manage what are increasingly unmanageable politicians. Any familiarity to real life? Naw!
Read Tom Ray’s “Benjamin Franklin and the Witch of Endor” now!
The word was out that Hathaway was still a buffoon, so there weren’t a lot of applicants for the position. Despite Patricia Hathaway’s seeming hostility toward me, I was hired.
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(Also keep up on our new Fun Pop Poetry feature.)
The long and lazy summer! A time for reflection– for memories of childhood, of the old homestead, days past. Simpler times. The friends you had. The girl you knew.
Can we go back to those days? Should we go back? These questions are raised by Andy Tu’s bittersweet story, “The Old Neighborhood.” We think you’ll like it.
She’d always been somewhere in the bottom of his mind, covered by the office romances and two long-term girlfriends. She’d been there, like a buried treasure, unlocked and waiting for him to free it from beneath the sands, to simply open it and look.
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(REMINDER: Our Fun Pop Poetry feature is underway at our New Pop Lit Interactive blog. We need fun poems!)
(“Premonition” by Walter Nessler copyright Royal Air Force Museum.)
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Our month-long Hemingway celebration continues with a striking new story by Samuel Stevens, “Diminutives,” whose setting of Paris is a nod to Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation. But so is its style. Few writers understand what Ernest Hemingway was fully up to when he revolutionized writing. Stevens is one of them.
Note how Stevens’ story is like a Modernist painting– a collage of parts expressing the fragmentation of our time. As if helplessly riding a bus about to crash, we’re replaying– reliving– that broken insane world Hemingway experienced. Around us is a sense of foreboding. Imminence. Chaos.
Stevens’ story is simple but at the same time it’s a mix of impressions and ideas. A splash of confusion, or a slap in the face. The story is there in front of us, like a painting. Right there. It’s very short, but there’s enough in it to like or dislike. Or hate.
Provocative and topical.
But what do you think?
There were no subjects to write about any more, either in America or here; the world was too mixed up to really stop and look at it.
New Pop Lit 