May Day Fiction

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

A LOT OF STORIES are happening in America right now, from coverage of overseas wars to college encampments as symbols of unrest and dissent. In our opinion the chief story in this country is the widening gulf between rich and poor in America. A wealth gap of a kind that’s never been seen, not even in the robber baron days of the late 19th century. Today’s ruthless $200 billion-and-counting robber barons, Musk, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg and company make the previous kind look like unambitious storekeepers.

As our newest featured fiction we have a short story which gives us a look at what’s happening, “The Unhoused Gift” by Peter R. West, via characters on both sides of the equation. The story is set in Southern California.

I have a sister who lives in California. She keeps me informed on what’s happening, has said the state is a model for what will soon enough happen in the rest of the country. (I tell her there already are increasing numbers of homeless where we live.) Rising rents and cost-of-living; more unhoused people. “Your state’s going to turn into Brazil,” I say, about a country long known for its extreme wealth gap. “It already has,” my sister replies. Anyway, please read the new story and see what you think!

Like a bird of prey, Stanley Newman swooped down the curvy road that connected his Los Angeles hilltop mansion to the sprawling city below. The grin on his face grew bigger as he listened to a news report recounting how his client had walked away from the tabloid-covered trial. Stanley used every trick he’d developed over twenty-five years of legal scheming in the often-sensational Los Angeles criminal scene to help another big fish escape the hooks of justice.

Goodbye 2023!

Announcement

NO DOUBT 2023 was a tough year for everyone except a handful of tech billionaires who gathered enormous wealth–

— but we got through it, which is what counts. In so doing, at New Pop Lit we published a variety of sterling work, fiction and poetry both. In our admittedly biased opinion, some of the best writing to be found anywhere. Doubt this? Then click onto our “TOP OF THE POP” page and browse around. READ some of the stories and poems. They fit our goal of being readable and striking.

WHAT ELSE were we up to in 2023? For one, our “Save the Writer!” petition, which has us standing at the forefront among literary people in questioning the dubious benefits of Artificial Intelligence. If you have not yet signed the petition– you should.

WE ALSO began a new page at our site, Fast Pop Lit— a site within a site, really– for posting shorter work much faster than we can put up our longer features. Also, as a way to promote those writers we do feature at our main site. Plus, it’s as striking looking as any literary site out there– a reflection of our intention to be not just one more literary mag. Previews, interviews, commentary, satires– with much more to come. Check it out!

Then stay tuned for a lot more to come in 2024.

What Will New Fiction Look Like?

Pop Lit Fiction

FOR US, that’s the big question, as we’re a forward-looking literary project out to decipher how the literary art will change– how it must change to retain any place in this crazy noisy society. Or in any society. (One criterion we look for in new fiction is universality: Is it enough of a tale to appeal to anyone anyplace?)

We’ll take, in our mad quest, pieces of ideas from anytime in the past– if we believe they’ll work with readers today. For instance: the yarn. The kind of Mark Twain Bret Harte Jack London story told at night around a campfire, or under an urban streetlamp, or in a dorm room. Something maybe over-the-top, often imaginative, and definitely so compelling you couldn’t stop listening– or reading– if you tried. Three months ago, New Pop Lit’s two editors (we hope to add others) were sitting around a coffee shop discussing this very notion. We’d presented several terrific tales in the past, but we wanted more. Give us stories! we shouted (not really), but wanted to, whether propelled by the love of literature and art or from too much caffeine. Lo and behold, arriving into our Inbox that very day was a wild story– definitely a yarn– set in New York City, that maddest, wildest, most ambitious of all cities. The story: “Give the People Guns” by Bela Seitz. Please click on the title and read.

Bela Seitz anyway seems wildly talented. Perhaps one of a phalanx of new prodigies prepared to bring fresh imagination and excitement into today’s literary game? One never knows. Idealists that we are, we hope so. We also hope you enjoy the story.

Grey billowing clouds rushed across the sky, as though someone had a high-powered fan propelling them across the vast blue expanse so that the weather could match the demeanor of the collected reporters. They used to have passion in their eyes, but now their faces were taut, stretched with the gravity of the situation and an innate understanding that the news was no longer something to look at on your phone and laugh about – but was something to be taken seriously.

All About Poets

Pop Lit Fiction

SAN FRANCISCO!

–a long-time center of America’s poetry scene, filled with memories of legendary poets Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and so many others– and legendary poetry readings such as the one at Six Gallery.

TODAY we have a feature story set in San Francisco, about poets: “My Poet Friend” by San Francisco writer-poet William Taylor Jr. A story of atmosphere and humor centered around one poet in particular, who is– like so many practitioners of the poetic art– a character.

More, it’s a story about the lives of struggling writers. Many of us struggle for years and never “make it”– but writing is not about making it. Being an artist of any kind is about the mad pursuit and the lifestyle and the experience. Creating and sharing those creations, and in turn, experiencing the works– the sounds, images, words– of others. Always learning, opening brain pathways, developing spiritually, hopefully, while experiencing more vitally and viscerally than many the echoes of life. Falling short in our artistry, maybe, but leaving behind some legacy or trace we were here, or at least leaving our carcass on the slopes of the artistic mountain we were trying to climb.

Anyone having met writers both high and low knows the more authentic version is the poet friend found in William Taylor’s entertaining story.

My poet friend returned to the bar and we drank in silence, looking at the girls and wrestling with our existential dread. The Revolutionary Poets got louder and drunker as the night went on, their table crowded with half-empty pitchers of beer as they argued about poetry and politics. Linda was standing now, swaying a bit as she drove her points home, wine sloshing out of her glass.

Winners and Writers

Announcement

A QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT

FOR THOSE who haven’t heard, we have a winner in our first cash prize contest, one Tom Ray. Check out our NPL News story about it.

ON OTHER FRONTS, we’ve been using our revamped Special Projects blog for quirky writings, often of a humorous nature, as well as for sneak previews of pop lit things-to-come. Peruse our latest offering, “Sending the Dog to a Farm” by Gregg Maxwell Parker. Next up there will be amusing fiction from Wred Fright— before we move on at last to our planned collaborative novel– which should be fun!?

Plus much more.

(Art: “Organization” by Arshile Gorky.)

A Year of Experiment

Announcement

2022

WHILE we plan to publish at this site a number of more traditional offerings of fiction and poetry, we also hope to showcase several more experimental works– how we define experimental. Meaning, in some way pop, but going beyond the merely entertaining and readable. It’s what we’re looking for anyway!

In the meantime, at our News blog we’ve posted two 2022 Announcements– here and here— about where we are as an ambitious literary project and what’s going on. Stay informed– we’re moving into new territory.

Literary Montage

Pop Lit Fiction

EXPERIMENTS IN FICTION

Call it montage, or the 3-D or multidimensional story, or literary polyphony, the point remains the same: To get away from the linear, one point-of-view, one-tense format in short story writing, which allows for little variety. The solution? To innovate.

Our new feature, “Waiting for the Superhero”— about a man trying to survive in a tough urban landscape– is an attempt to do so. The story plays with viewpoint– to increase angles– and with time. The trick is to do this without hindering the flow of the narrative. Indeed, if well utilized, the technique will increase drama and pace.

Putting fragments of writing together– like editing film– isn’t simple, but opens up endless creative possibilities. Expect to see us go way beyond what we’re showing to date. Just saying.

He moved into the basement of a nearby vacant building. The several-storied structure was in receivership; kept by the bank which owned it in a modicum of shape. There, Ernesto created a cave. An escape. A small window, easily pried, provided access.

The first night he noticed a visitor in the form of a pair of green eyes. A cat.

In daylight he realized the cat was more or less black. Ernesto adopted its guise. So garbed, in the evening he became invisible, blending into the night.

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(Art: “Night Over the City” by Otto Dix.)

What Does New Writing Look Like?

Pop Lit Fiction

THIS IS a question we hope to ask more often in coming months and perhaps provide answers– with the knowledge the short story is marginalized in the culture or at least fallen from its once-lofty station one hundred years ago when everyone in America was reading them and new story writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald were celebrities.

WILL the art become like string quartets or live theater– property of a set group of Insider cognoscenti based in select artistic capitals, with tiny groups of imitators scattered across the country, sharing their sacred texts like monks keeping an archaic cultural form scarcely alive? In what ways can it change? Is its regeneration doable– can a few Dr. Frankenstein mad scientists in artistic laboratories generate electricity through the monster’s body, and thereby rejuvenate it?

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We don’t know. Odds against the idea are steep. We only know that in future days we’ll be looking for stories which look different. Which try new things, no matter how offbeat or quirky.

TODAY we present a short story which looks and sounds different from the norm, “The Age of Insomnia” by Christopher Landrum. Not a linear story so much as a painting you look at and try to take in as one impression, with allusions to law, to literature, and to maybe the short story itself.

Father was a lawyer. The idea that all the cases and statutes of the law can be read together as some grand story sounds like a childish cliché—but what I wonder these nights is, can a story somehow be law?

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WE HAVE other thoughts about art and the short story in a post at our NPL News blog, here.

ALSO be sure to see what we’re doing new with our print issues, here.

New Pop Lit’s Summer Reading Festival!

Announcement, Pop Lit Fiction

The summer people choked the road, filled up the taverns, trashed the beachfront, and parked everywhere and anywhere, even in places they shouldn’t.

So begins the feature story kicking off our impromptu Summer Reading Festival 2021, “People Ruin Everything,” by Anne Leigh Parrish, one of the best short story writers going. I don’t know if a story could better capture how everyone feels right now after eighteen months of pandemic, of interruption in our lives we naively thought would be over after three weeks or at most three months, but goes on. The story captures the mood: frustration that may seem illogical, but it’s there, in all of us, as undercurrent to the resumption of our lives.

Anyway, it’s a short story which should be in The New Yorker, but we’re fortunate and grateful to have it at New Pop Lit, and trust you’ll agree with our opinion of it.

She thought about the note they left. She didn’t like being lied to. Some people lived on lies, made a career of them, in some cases. Just look at any politician. She hated people who thought they were smarter than everyone else, who made getting over a full-time job. They’d laughed as they walked up to the car, and they were probably still laughing wherever they were now and wherever they were going.

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What about the rest of our Festival? In coming weeks we’ll be featuring more great new fiction, as well as re-announcing selected readings– fiction and poetry– previously featured at this site. Is that all? NO!

OUR OPEN MIC RETURNS

We’re also restarting our Open Mic feature with a reading of a terrific poem by the UK’s Alisha J. Prince, “Heaven Bound.” Click the link and take a listen.

NEW YORK MEDIA NEWS

We ALSO have at our NPL News Blog a short article about curious doings at iconic Newsweek magazine. Is this the direction in which other New York publications will be headed? What do you think?

POP LIT PRINT READING

FINALLY, check out the print publications we now offer at our POP SHOP— where we’re free to be somewhat more experimental, in attitude, words, and design, than what we present here, as we attempt to cut new paths toward the literary future.

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Anyway, we hope everyone has a glorious summer– and does a lot of reading!

(Featured art: “Two Girls Reading” by Pablo Picasso.)

The Art of Narrative

Pop Lit Fiction

AN EXAMPLE OF SHORT STORY ARTISTRY

Our new fiction feature is about a church in the woods. A simple story which shows what can be done with the short story by keeping it simple. What matters most with this particular writing genre– the short story– is not how many well-wrought sentences and long paragraphs you can string together as an example of talent– but the form of a particular story. Its construction. Design. Momentum. Flow.

NOT MUCH MORE can be said about this particular tale, “The Narrow Path,” by Zach Smith, without giving away the key to its plot. Suffice it to say it’s in the tradition of classic short stories from when the short story was THE popular American art form. When the form of the story was all. When story endings were the point of the works, as exhibited by masters of the art such as O. Henry, Jack London, or Frank Stockton.

There’s a clue somewhere within the last part of the previous paragraph– about the story’s plot– if you can find it!

(Note: It’s also a Christmas story.)

The church is two stories, taller than it is wide, without a second floor. A taut wire, an inch in diameter stretches from wall to wall, ten feet above the pews, with a second shorter wire intersecting it above the altar.

The door opens for Sunday service, and the congregation files in. The church is open to everyone, but few people come, less and less every year.

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(Art: “Deer in Forest” by Franz Marc; “Indian Church” by Emily Carr.)