A New Kind of Horror

MONSTERS AND GOBLINS are products of the imagination. Reflections of our irrational minds.

What happens in an electronic world which overstimulates the brain to ever-higher levels of panic and hysteria? When media infiltrates our every waking and sleeping thought?

THESE QUESTIONS and others are raised in D.C. Miller’s intense, pop-tinged speculative novel, Dracula Rules the World and Mark Zuckerberg Is His Son. With his permission we’re able to present, in time for the mad pagan holiday of Halloween, five excerpts from the book.

Are the monsters inside us– or outside in the world?

Caught in the same chain of spaces, back and forth, between my apartment and the office, always facing a screen, as if I was trying to outstare it, it had gradually become unclear when I was inside the headset and when I was outside it.

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(Painting: “Vampire” by Edvard Munch.)

What Does New Fiction Look Like?

Pop Lit Fiction

OUR TASK at New Pop Lit is to find and present the best new writers. We don’t know what fiction in the future will look like– only that it shouldn’t resemble the acceptable fiction of now. Ideally, it should be more unorthodox, more creative, more real.

If our newest feature story is a guide, young writers are accomplishing those goals. A.K. Riddle‘s “The Professor” is an example of writing not yet constrained, handcuffed and put into a box. It shows as well the rare ability to put oneself into the head of another person.

The story, about a middle-aged and somewhat burned-out teacher at a prep school, is also entertaining– the first objective of any work. We hope you like it!

The Professor looks like a resurrected and plastic surgeried John Lennon. The Professor has a dog named after his ex-girlfriend, Layla. But his wife thought their pooch was named after the Eric Clapton song. The Professor is married but doesn’t wear anything on his left hand except for a black friendship bracelet, if that counts.

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ALSO: Stay up on the All-Time American Writers Tournament. An announcement of more entrants is coming soon.

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(Artwork: “The Miller” by Juan Gris.)

New Pop Lit Loves Women!

Pop Lit Fiction

THERE’S NO DOUBT this is the decade of the woman writer. The majority of students in writing programs today are women. The majority of writers self-publishing via zines and ebooks are women. Of the National Book Foundation’s recent “5 Under 35” award selections, all five are women.

Far be it for New Pop Lit to neglect a trend. We’ll be presenting several talented writers in coming weeks who just happen to be women. We’re not being politically correct. We just go for the best.

First up is internationally-published writer Julie Parks with “Bigger Lies”— a stark urban tale about a boy with scams and dreams in Latvia.

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In keeping with this week’s theme, at the All-Time American Writers Tournament we have a short essay about a renowned woman writer: “The Mary Gaitskill Problem.”

If you’re not keeping up with New Pop Lit, you’re not keeping up.
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(Paintings: “Woman with Black Cravat” by Modigliani; Self Portrait by Marie-Denise Villers.)

A New Story

Pop Lit Fiction

We like stories!

We like stories which are unpredictable in plot, point-of-view, and theme– such as our new feature, “Churchgoing in New England” by Richard Greenhorn. We’re on a quest for new kinds of stories– those outside the customary in ideas and viewpoint.

What should any short story accomplish?

The tale should convey knowledge and experience; emotion and meaning. It should carry the reader along then finish with surprise, insight, or impact. Something. See if this story fulfills those requirements.

One-time department stores and groceries had been replaced by specialty winter supply shops, novelty bookstores, a few adult boutiques, and an over-priced Leftist drinking establishment called The People’s Pub. On the town commons across the street were the placards and banners left over from this morning’s protest. . .

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ALSO: Stay up-to-date with the All-Time American Writers Tournament.
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(Painting: “A New England Town” by Middleton Manigault.)

Storms and Shelters

Pop Lit Fiction

Storms have been in the news of late. As such, they’re the theme of the moment at New Pop Lit.

First, we feature a subtly emotional short story from one of the best story writers in America, Anne Leigh Parrish. The story is “Shelter.” Its underlying motifs are refuge and authenticity.

Cara’s truck bumped up the road, the rain in the headlights so thick it looked like snow. Drake was at the wheel. He insisted on driving. She was no good at it, he said, not on a road like this. Plus, the transmission was going. Hadn’t she said she was going to get it fixed?

We’ve just nominated a previous story of Anne’s “Picture This,” for the Best of the Net 2017 anthology, along with other work. See our nominations at our News blog.

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For other storms, at least stormy personalities, check out the four most recent selections at the All-Time American Writers Tournament. Volatile personalities. Volatile art. Examples of the energy of which American literature can occasionally generate.

We’re out to capture, create, and showcase similar literary energy. Keep following us!

(Painting: “Storm in the Mountain” by Albert Bierstadt.)

Of Princes and Posts

Pop Lit Fiction

What makes a good short story?

Conciseness, crisis, atmosphere, character– along with insight on human nature and the world. Above all the tale must be compulsively readable. Our new feature story “The Little Prince” by Brian Eckert embodies all of this. A thunderstorm and a curse– can the self-possessed “prince” get out of his dilemma?

Really what Greg wanted was to be left alone, to his devices—and as he got older, his vices. His aloofness was what others found distasteful about him. There was a mark of royalty on a man who preferred to be alone. Others felt diminished in his presence.
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Also keep up-to-date on our exclusive coverage of the All-Time American Writers Tournament! #4 bracket seedings coming soon.

(Painting: “Starry Night Over the Rhone” by Vincent Van Gogh.)

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.)

Detroit Meets New York

Pop Lit Fiction

We could call this week’s feature “Portrait of a Young Detroit Guitarist.” We’re privileged to run excerpts from an exciting new novel by a New York City photographer. “Frisky Moser” (his pen name) was once in a Detroit rock band, and has now penned a fictionalized-and-fresh version of events, “Jack Strat and His Baby Blues.”

Lately there’s been an influx of talented New Yorkers– artists, entrepreneurs, edge-seekers– into Detroit, as the Motor City continues its comeback. The aptly-named Frisky is evidence it’s a two-way interchange.

She started putting on makeup, mostly working her lashes and lips, checking me out as I was sitting on the couch with my guitar in my lap. I could see her stealing glances at me in the mirror. We were alone.
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Art: “Harlequin with Guitar 1919” by Juan Gris.
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With the fiction and at our Features page you’ll find actual photos of Jack– and his boots.
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(Also keep up-to-date with the All-Time American Writers Tournament.)

A Pop Canon?

All-Time American Writers Tournament

Did pop literature exist in the past?

Absolutely! Our latest bracket selections for the big Tournament include two of the most famous, hugely popular, world-renowned writers ever— both American– in the persons of Jack London and Edgar Allan Poe. From the days when the most fascinating, charismatic, or crazy persons in society became writers. (Which made for fascinating reading.)

Another selectee, Emily Dickinson, could be called a pop poet. The fourth, Tennessee Williams, a pop playwright? That’s stretching it.

Does their work hold up?

Read Jack London’s terrific story “Lost Face” and find out.

–in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him– for him, who was so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery–

Fiction as Life, as Emotion, as Art

Pop Lit Fiction

PART OF OUR MISSION at New Pop Lit is to present the most powerful fiction we can find, from the best new writers. We fulfill that mission with our newest short story, “The Fetus,” by Clint Margrave. It’s a tale of high school and bullying, but it’s more than that. Art’s task is to give us the complexity and confusions of life; of our crazy, cruel, three-dimensional world.

The bell rang and Mr. Schlosser asked us to open our textbooks to the introductory chapter.

“Biology is the study of living things,” he said. “One of the central questions we’ll be exploring this semester is what does it mean to be alive?”

(Artwork: “Still Life” by Juan Gris.)
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p.s. Also stay up on the All-Time American Writers Tournament!