How to Save Literature

WHAT?? Experimental DIY author Wred Fright is going to save literature?

Well, he and others like him will if they maintain their imaginative ways of looking at fiction and literature– at what qualifies as fiction and literature. New ways of presenting the art, being readable, hooking unaware members of the greater populace on reading. Sorry, folks, but in the long run– or really, the short run– well-crafted New Yorker stories full of long paragraphs of finely-tuned verbiage putting masses of Manhattan commuters on trains and subways, or businesspersons on crowded airplane flights, to sleep just aren’t going to cut it.

Fiction needs what to compete?

First, immediacy. Second, the unfamiliar. The humorous or surprising.

WE’RE NOT saying Wred Fright is Tolstoy, mind you. (Though one never knows how he’ll be treated in future centuries as mankind keeps changing. He may well be taught in 2118 at online universities, the brick and mortar kind having been long closed or turned into the very WalMarts that Mr. Fright loves to mock!)

Enough of this– read “Yelp in Reverse.” Thanks for being here!

It’s two in the morning, I just want to keep doing shots in the manager’s office and get through the night at what has to be the worst Walmart in America. I want to get out of this hellhole, but a gal dreaming of a lucrative career in retail management has to start somewhere.

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KEEP UP on News of the Literary World at New Pop Lit News.
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(Main art: “Still Life of Books” by Jan Davidszoon de Heem. Tolstoy painting by Repin.)

Experiments in Pop III

Pop Lit Fiction

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.)

Brian Moves Back

Third-Way Fiction

October is getting on, New Pop Lit fans, which makes it a perfect time to bring you something from the dark side…

Wred Fright gives us a flash-fiction tale today, filled with scary dead-ends and the remnants of dreams. Feast upon Brian Moves Back!

After college, Brian moved back to his shitty hometown.
Slept in his shitty old bed in his parents’ shitty old house.
His parents got upset every time Brian called their town “shitty”.