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Atmospheric Pop

Pop Lit Fiction

WE NOW have a second example of actual creative writing up at our new Fast Pop Lit site– “What Happened at Drake’s” by aptly named Lukas Tallent.

The idea: presenting an aesthetic of mood and style. We believe this short fictional piece accomplishes that: Drinks, a restaurant, nighttime.

Click on and plunge in.

There were fireworks in their eyes, and smoke from their mouths hovered visibly in the room. They both had drinks, brightly-colored and in tall fizzy glasses. He was talking to her, and she was leaning forward, her arms on the table, taken it seemed. The others in the bar were lost in their own dramas and excuses and relaxers and sports games. . . .

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PETITION UPDATE: We’re over the 900 mark with the “Save the Writer!” petition calling for labeling of AI-generated bot books. Not bad for an effort backed by no big names or established institutions. The signers: everyday writers and artists. Those who’ll be most harmed by the mad rush of tech plutocrats to disrupt the arts.

Happiness?

Opinion

ARE WE SERIOUS about our Happiness campaign?

Absolutely. It’s a needed reaction to the depressing state of the culture now– and the state of the world. Celebrations of depravity quickly become tiresome. Nothing is more boring than gazing upon a garbage dump. We’re out to brighten things up.

BESIDES, when we later publish edgy new work– we enjoy edginess when it’s done well– it will stand out vividly against a Happiness backdrop.

At the forefront of course of our new Happiness campaign is our Special Edition of Fun Pop Poetry, the Happiness Journal. A modified version of the standard model: FPP SE. Order yours today.

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.

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!

New Pop Lit Reinvents the Literary Journal

Announcement

CREATING THE NEW

We’re reinventing literary publications with innovations in writing and design, as seen in our latest print publication–

–the first genuine step toward a fully cubist/three-dimensional literary presentation combining words and art into a kaleidoscope of creation of a kind never before seen. Neo-modernism? Or: Neo-Pop?

Available at our POP SHOP.

Bold and readable, the future is upon us, NOW.

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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.”

Extreme Zeen Two

Announcement

AN EXCITING NEW PUBLICATION

Our collective lives on this planet are defined by what we create. By the legacy we leave. What will that legacy be? Mediocrity?

At New Pop Lit we’re planting a marker in the culture saying, “No! Beauty and intelligence did not die in the decade of the 2020s. We know 1920s writers and artists were amazing. But so are we!”

Our newest publication, Extreme Zeen 2, is a demonstration of what future literary excitement can look like. A print lit journal whose words and colors jump off the page. Like nothing before seen.

Extreme Zeen– TWO! Available NOW at our POP SHOP.

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Welcome 2021!

Announcement

FOR US and what we’re trying to accomplish with this project, 2020 was a learning year. Learning not only about paper, printing, and design– which will pay dividends (we hope) with our print publications this year, but also, further learning about what does and does not work with the short story regarding pace, viewpoint, momentum, the ending, and much else. Our philosophy is simple: Always Be Improving.

WE BELIEVE more than ever the short story can be much better than it is now, or has ever been. The trick is perfecting new techniques to prove this.

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COMING to this our main site early this year will be new work by talented writers such as Charles Shoultz, Chelsea Sieg, and Tom Preisler. Fiction, prose poetry, poetry– and much else. We’re very selective– we have our own unique standards– but the one thing we look for is talent. New talent wherever we can find it. Follow us or otherwise keep up with what we’re doing, because a lot is going to happen in 2021.

IN THE MEANTIME, check out the latest post at our NEWS blog. Thanks!

Tale of the Christmas Bear 2020

Pop Fiction

(YET ANOTHER REPRISE OF A NEW POP LIT CHRISTMAS STORY.)

jamestissotthejourneyofthemagi

THREE MEN were having trouble lugging their packages across the desert from afar, and came across a depressed bear. Depressed because there wasn’t much to do for a bear in the desert. A bear in a desert? Anyway, the bear was feeling purposeless and alone, and didn’t know if he could “bear it” much longer.

“Why oh why oh why oh why?” he asked, in bear talk.

The three men saw the bear lying in the sand, moaning, with his paws over his head. The three looked at one another.

 “After all, it is Christmas,” one of them said, with a perplexed look in his eyes.

“Yes, it is,” one of the other three said.

 “Yes!” said the third. “It truly is. It really really is.”

 He took his smartphone from his robes and looked at it. Yep, there it was. December 24th. Christmas Eve. Year 0000.

“It’s decided then,” the three said simultaneously, and wondered that the three of them, each from a separate faraway land, had said the same thing.

So together in one voice they asked the despondent animal if he’d like to try “bearing” something useful– their heavy packages of gold, frankincense, and myrrh– to a destination in Bethlehem. The packages were in fact quite heavy and overburdening the camels. Encountering the bear was a fortunate occurrence. Almost miraculous. The bear gladly agreed, as the three men seemed particularly wise to him. He’d seen men before, who were not wise. Not wise at all. But these men were.

The little caravan continued on to Bethlehem until they found shepherds and animals congregated outside a tiny stable behind an inn. The three wise men strode in, bearing their gifts, while the bear quietly crept in behind them and took a place in the straw beside the other animals, who were first alarmed because, after all, he was a bear. But then they looked at the baby and weren’t alarmed at all.

 From that day forward the bear was always forever more a happy bear.

 THE END

fraangelicaoadorationofthemagi

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from New Pop Lit!

 -Karl Wenclas and Kathleen M. Crane
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(Paintings: “The Journey of the Magi” by James Tissot; “Adoration of the Magi” by Fra Angelico.)