spies

Strategy and Literature

Pop Lit Fiction

WE’VE BEEN THINKING a lot of late about games and strategy. About what we’re doing right and the literary mainstream is doing wrong– or more often, the size of the obstacle they represent and what we’re doing imperfectly in hoping to compete with them. In such discussions, the strategy of chess comes to mind.

AT PRESENT we’re behaving like a tentative chess player pushing pawns forward, hoping to find or create an opening– which, if one ever appears, we’ll need to jump through with all forces, talents, words, and arguments at our disposal.

WHICH BRINGS US TO our new featured story,  “I May Have Been a Chess World Champion” by talented international writer Eva Ferry. It’s ostensibly about chess and chess players, but it’s about more than that. A metaphor for– ? The story carries the atmosphere of a spy novel. It evokes the feeling of hopelessness, dread, expectation and fear which engulfs the culture now, perhaps the entire world. But it’s only about chess. Or is it?

The men in the Centre were saggy, they were not handsome by anyone’s standards. But the beauty of their effort, their perfect commitment was real.

I wanted to be real too. That’s why I told the man from upstairs that I would be going to the tournament, even if that was the last thing I did in my life.
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Speaking of terrific writers and writing, at the All-Time American Writers Tournament there’s a new Appreciation, this one by Robin Wyatt Dunn about Gene Wolfe. What strong writing looks like. Only 437 words but it’s dynamite.
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Painting: “The Chess Player” by Frederich August Moritz Retzsch.

Experiments in Pop II

Pop Lit Fiction

The American scene today is saturated in politics. FBI CIA NSA antifa alt-right movements parties investigations spies recordings informants everyplace.

Though it sometimes resembles a comedy routine, this is fertile ground for the writer. An endless series of fictional possibilities present themselves. We’re back in Edgar Wallace days, where all plot scenarios become believable. Maybe likely.

Samuel J. Stevens explores one of those scenarios in a short, dryly humorous piece aptly titled, “The Vast Conspiracy.” Another in our explorations of the artistic fusion of “pop” and “literary.”

Happy reading!

They did not look like the thugs he’d seen in old Bureau files. They looked indistinguishable from the trendy hipster kids that populated the Village and Williamsburg, the only difference being they wore suits.