WE LOOK for writers to invent pop lit style– new writing which is readable but also intelligent, meaningful, and real.

This week we have a new story by Dr. Wred Fright which qualifies as a possible pop lit template: “Operative 72 Takes a Swim.”

29) 73 wasn’t sure how much time had passed. There was always just the sea, the sun, and an island full of retired intelligence operatives rewarded with Sodom in the South Pacific.

65) Johnson was very drunk one night. “God wouldn’t care,” he said, pointing around at the rest of the bar, “If we killed every single one of them.”
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American literature needs to be reinvented to retain credibility as an art form– for it NOT to be ghettoized within the broader culture. With changing technology, the art itself must change.

We believe in artistic change. The more esteemed “literary” segments of publishing have forever been last to jump on a change bandwagon.

This dates from 1955, when low-priced paperbacks began conquering the interest of the general reader. Harcourt Brace published a poetry anthology, edited by Oscar Williams, containing work from all the great American poets. Distinguished publishers Charles Scribners and Sons, and the MacMillan Company, refused to to permit the work of their poets, T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate among them, to appear in the paperback edition– because it was a paperback.

Question: Does literature belong to an enlightened few, or to everyone?
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(Painting by Paul Gauguin.)