hyper-pop fiction

The Idea Factory?

Opinion

ONE OF our aspirations for this website and its assorted blogs is to be an idea factory for the literary arts– experimenting with new techniques and strategies in an attempt to break out of the niche within which are trapped not only indy projects like ours, but increasingly, literature itself, within the vast noise of the noisiest society in world history: 330 million shouting, screaming voices, many of them writers.

WHICH IS WHY we reject “One Size Only” thinking. The notion there’s only one way of doing things– or, as Henry Ford famously said, “You can have any color car you like as long as it’s black.”

Colors in our presentations? “Can’t do that!” say people who still watch black-and-white TV, look only at black-and-white paintings at the art museum, and read somber tomes of bleak descriptions of alcoholic Bukowski-wannabes lying comatose in back alleys.

Pop motifs? Over-the-top characters? Dramatic situations? A faster-than-usual pace? “NO!!” other lit people scream, who’ve been trained to believe only that which is inaccessible and difficult qualifies as “Literature” with a capital L, meant for a well-screened cognoscenti. “Connoisseurship”; “heightening of the prose style” and all the other rationalizations for artistically playing it safe.

Yet for writers to escape the prison cell this society has placed them in, they’ll have to crash out. With crowbars, battering rams and dynamite.

We’ve taken a few modest steps in doing that, including the novella The Loud Boys, available via ebook at several outlets, with print version coming. Hyper-pop fiction, which includes multidimensional writing.

(An excellent review of it by Michael Maiello just came out at his Substack, here. Please read the review –and while you’re at it, become a subscriber of his. Michael’s columns are consistently interesting.)

ALSO, we have two multiple-viewpoint stories to be featured here in winter and early spring, along with other striking offerings. Multiple viewpoints are a precursor to the multidimensional version. Watch for them!

OTHER plans are in place. Now, if we can just get our hands on some artistic dynamite. . .

But Is It Literature?

Announcement

ANNOUNCING THE RELEASE OF THE LOUD BOYS

THE QUESTION is whether or not it’s permissible to present hyper-pop writing as literature– mandarins in Manhattan and portions of academia would shake their heads “No!” in strong disagreement– when before the Technocratic Era of American Literature which began during the Cold War– circa 1950– hyper-pop emotional involved-in-the-world populist, naturalist, melodramatic, Dumas and Dickens writing was the standard of value. High Modernism and its distorted offshoot, Postmodernism, were on a railway side track. Definitely not the main line as it was later portrayed to be by those with an assortment of agendas to push.

OUR GOAL at New Pop Lit from the beginning of this ambitious project was to bring literature back to the people, via readable, exciting, entertaining and meaningful writing which can connect with the everyday lives of everybody. NOT solely an insular snobby elite removed from the hectic wars of society which seem to become with each passing year ever more hectic and challenging. For many of us, it’s a fight just to survive. Plodding dull fiction– Stoner by John Williams for example– doesn’t cut it.

The new novella The Loud Boys is an attempt to present the antithesis of the status quo Stoner mindset. The book has roots in a variety of influences, from Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler, to movie editing techniques and even graphic novels.

A few posts explaining some of the aesthetic and strategic ideas behind it:

“Open Territory.”

“About Graphic Novels.”

“All About ‘The Loud Boys.'”

“Simultaneity.”

ARE the ideas behind hyper-pop aka multidimensional writing the future of the literary game? We’ll find out!