Author: collabnovel

Needed: Better Literary Criticism

A RANT

EVERY TIME I begin to read a standard 7,000-word essay of literary criticism, I recall something Bret Easton Ellis once said at a bookstore appearance in Philadelphia: “Now I’m going to bore you for twenty minutes.” (Then he did, by reading from his work.)

Boredom, among the established literary set, is a given.

For instance, however well, or mildly provocative, the standard New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New Left Review, Granta, etc. tome starts, it quickly enough becomes a snooze. A bore. An effort one must slog through, like wading through a three-foot puddle of mud. Or sometimes, sludge.

The essays have no hook. None. Any point they have to make is made in the first three paragraphs– inevitably, very long paragraphs. The essays build no momentum. They aim toward nothing. At best, they offer a wry bon mot in the last sentence. Why would anyone who is not a Phd student or hard-core literary critic read them?

THE QUESTION is whether we have or are going to have an organic, from-the-people American literature– the voice of We the People– or a distorted Frankenstein monster imposed by the MIC (Military-Industrial-Complex) and tax-shelter plutocrats care of Washington D.C. and the Imperial City of New York. (I say MIC, mindful of where funding for some prestigious literary journals and the first important writing program came from: a direction imposed many decades ago.)

THE CHIEF TASK of those involved in creating and promoting literature– according to the actions and writings of our literary intellectuals– is maintenance of the status quo. Some of us believe more is required.

I ask myself, when reading well-hyped, much-awarded critical essays: Who’s the target audience? What’s the profile of the presumed reader?

Whoever is targeted, it can’t be a very large demographic.

I’m being optimistic. Most likely it’s only the close-reading crowd, where the review or opinion itself isn’t the point, but how it’s been worded: well-wrought sentences to gush over. The more over-wrought– the craftsman relentlessly pounding the piece over an anvil until it’s been flattened obliterated insensibly into one inscrutable mass of verbiage– the better.

CRITICISM IN CRISIS?

That’s the premise of this 6,000-word essay by Colin Vanderburg in the Spring 2025 issue of New York-based literary journal n+1. Pretentious blather, for the most part, from its French title on down, but at least Vanderburg acknowledges most critics live in the hermetically sealed world of academia and are speaking solely to themselves. At that, he doesn’t seem to realize the full extent of the crisis as it concerns the university world he’s recently entered. Nowhere is a mention of AI chatbots and the effect they’re already having on entering students. What happens if all academic papers are written by an electronic device? What purpose will be left for the university– and critics like Vanderburg– if all ideas are contained in said device, available with a ten-second prompt? Will students continue to pay $60,000 a year to attend such places, and submit AI papers for AI perusal and grading? What steps are necessary to preempt that dystopia? Vanderburg doesn’t know, or isn’t saying.

NEEDED: EXCITEMENT

Literary change is coming. Change is necessary to combat top-down tech control of every aspect of human culture. Change is inevitable. The question is whether writers and intellectuals will decide to become part of that change, or dwindle into irrelevance. Critics have a role to play, not solely within obsolete institutions, but as part of society and culture as a whole. Not just a role. A responsibility. Which is to GET THE WORD OUT about new writers and new art.

Which is why we plan to use this site, Fast Pop Lit, as a platform for short criticism that rocks. That grabs unwary readers from behind laptops or smartphones, by the collar, and gives them a hard shake to say, “WAKE UP!”

(Send concise and opinionated criticism to newpoplit@gmail.com. 400 words max suggested but not required.)

-K. Wenclas

“a non-writer for the new yorker” by Ken Kakareka

NEW POETRY

you won’t see
a passage of
my writing
featured in
the SAT.
you won’t
read
a paragraph
and think:
the fuck
did i
just read?
some writers
try
to confuse
you
with their
pretense
and
deranged syntax,
but i aim
to be clear
and simple.
so if you
read
the new yorker
and think
this writer
sounds like
a self-serving
asshole,
pick up
my work
instead.

Ken Kakareka is an American writer of works of fiction and nonfiction, such as BULLSHIT (Anxiety Press, 2024) and Summer of Irresponsibility (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His novella PARIS IN ALL ITS GLORY is on its way with Anxiety Press. Ken’s work has appeared or is on its way in numerous rags including Gargoyle Magazine, The Disappointed Housewife, and Foofaraw. He has been nominated twice for a Best of the Net. A list of selected publications can be found at kenkakareka.com.

An Excerpt from “The Wrong Crowd” by Lyn Michele Stevens

NEW FICTION

The evening before, Jack had called eager to take her to see Shakespeare in the Park. Though Esther had always lived in a studio on York Avenue, she’d never been to Shakespeare in the Park (or the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty). She was flattered Jack wanted to take her. It was only their second date. All she had to do was wait in the handicap line to get the tickets.

“But neither of us is handicapped. Isn’t that against the law?”

Jack snickered. “Against the law. That’s a good one.” Then in an apologetic tone he said, “Look, it’s the only way. I would go, but I have an important meeting with a client.”

Esther set Sparkles on the warm cable box. She fed her some treats before freshening her makeup and grabbing her Allure magazine. “I promise to be back soon,” she said, kissing Sparkles.

Jack had been right. The regular line was a snake with no tail. A park worker pointed her to some people waiting under the wooden awning of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The first was a severely handicapped guy whose limbs looked like branches glued together at odd angles, arms and legs both hooked in braces. What an awful tragedy, thought Esther.

Considering how horrible her own accident had been, Esther felt blessed. Thirty years earlier, at the age of 21, on the way to see her fiancé, she’d been in a near fatal car crash, resulting in a coma lasting three months while they sewed her together. The fiancé abandoned her during her recovery. (Another blessing in disguise; had it not been for the crash Esther might be married to that prick.) A dozen surgeries later, all that remained of the accident was a sunken eye and a metal rod in her femur.

A young person in a wheelchair plowed up the short incline, spun herself around and parked her wheelchair next to Esther.

“Fucking pain in my fucking ass,” she muttered, yanking the hand brake. She tugged the bandana off her forehead and wiped her face.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

WHO Has the Best Writing?

BEST STORIES AND POEMS DEPT.

At New Pop Lit we’ll put our stories, poems and essays up against ANYBODY’S.

Case in Point #1:

Our nominations for the 2026 Best of the Net collection.

Case in Point #2:

Our excellent current “Top of the Pop” fiction feature, “Big Lagoon” by Thomas Thonson. A plunge into deep water, but also into humanity and life.

Have you read it yet?

WHO has the best writing?

WE do!

The Frankfurt School: Lost in America

A RANT

(Image c/o wikiwand. Early Brutalism?)

THE PROBLEM with our intellectual class is how easily impressed they are with the facade of intellectualism, especially when presented in a university setting.

THE CLASSIC example of such is the so-called Frankfurt School of German Marxist intellectuals who set up shop in the United States (at Columbia University in New York) when the Austrian paper hanger and his crew of violent misfits took power in Germany in 1933.

New York academics were of course happy to have such distinguished names operating on their turf. Horkheimer! Marcuse! Adorno! Fromm! “The Frankfurt School”– in America!

Unfortunately, the great minds transplanted across an ocean were disconnected from their roots, in the sense that America was not Europe. Due to the circumstances of its founding and settling, America had become a unique culture: mostly lower-class Scotch-Irish, African, Native American, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and other influences mixed together in a blender. Best evidenced by the rise of rock n’ roll in the early-to-mid 1950’s, with origins tracing back to the 1800’s.

Rock n’ roll? Chuck Berry? Bill Haley? Little Richard?? Elvis Presley??! Our well-schooled recently arrived Frankfurt visitors couldn’t comprehend it. A barrage of chaotic energy blasting from 45 rpm vinyl disks on turntables. “What is this?” they asked. To them it sounded like pulsating screeches from an alien planet. They scrambled for an explanation. As the musical contagion– sprung from black churches, Appalachian porches, and Memphis/New Orleans/Chicago/New Jersey streetcorners– quickly became commercialized via low-rent hustlers Leonard Chess, Alan Freed, Sam Phillips, Dick Clark, Berry Gordy Jr. and others, the Frankfurt Boys and their gullible follow-the-rules students came up with inapplicable theories of top-down “masscult” and other status quo reactionary rationalizations, not realizing that at the core of the rock n’ roll explosion sat a simple truth: this was American DIY up-from-below folk music. Something Marxists should’ve been able to appreciate.

But the German professional intellectuals were already committed to austerely elitist varieties of classical music and other difficult or inscrutable art forms, and Marxism had by then already lost whatever populist views it’d once held, had become a thoroughly institutionalized Ivory Tower philosophy. As the clueless buttoned-down expats from Europe well represented.

-Karl Wenclas

“Season of Monarchs” by John Brantingham

FLASH FICTION

(image c/o wallpapersafari)

Stephanie goes out back with her morning coffee to find her milkweed bush covered with September monarchs preparing for their long flight back to Mexico. Then she’s inside her earliest memory of her father, back from World War II, seeing each other for the first time. It was the season of monarchs then too, and they had a milkweed bush covered then like now in butterflies. Her father had snapped off a branch and handed it to her. He told her it was a magic wand, that this is how you made magic wands, with the joy of butterflies, and he had her go around the house and garden making wishes. He asked her if she wanted an ice cream sundae, and she said that she did, and he said that she should use her wand, and she did, and still in his uniform, he made her one. Later, he would deal with anger and alcohol and nightmares and the whole litany of things that people who have lived war experience, but what she remembers is that at the center of the man was a person who just loved his child. Today, she snaps off a wand, the butterflies rising in a cloud around her, and she backs off onto the porch. She would wish for something, but she realizes that what she wants is this, this moment alone with her father all these decades later.

John Brantingham is the recipient of a New York State Arts Council grant and was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Check out his work at johnbrantingham.com.

“The Day Trump Died”

A SHORT STORY

(image c/o skycasketsdotcom)

We heard the news and rushed outside. The sun was shining. Birds singing. Everyone happy.

We scribbled out a song in celebration, came up with a quick melody, then went down the basement to our little home studio and recorded it. Fun singing. Total throaty energy. She strummed a guitar. I clapped out a beat. No AI.

We posted the song online and announced it on social media. We didn’t think of charging anything. No paywall. Total goodwill.

Within an hour thirty million people had streamed it. Neighbors who’d heard about the song collected outside our house and began singing it. We joined them. People were dancing. More people. Soon: beer and pizza. Wild rejoicing.

A major record label contacted us and offered a contract. “Yes!” we said. Prepare the papers.

More news appeared online and on TV, with more details. Someone reported the president’s last words: “Melissa Maloney.”

Melissa Maloney? His first girlfriend, apparently. He’d met her after prep school, the summer before he went to college. The only woman he’d ever really loved, before he became a ruthless, narcissistic sociopath.

Reporters tracked her down to a retirement home in North Carolina. An elderly woman sitting next to a window. “Who?” she asked.

New President Vance meanwhile revealed plans to remodel the White House yet again, with plusher sofas.

Then: more news. “President Trump is not dead,” a serious-voiced network commentator intoned on television screens, with more frowns on his dramatic face than normal. Dark clouds appeared outside, threatening rain.

Our recording contract with the major label was cancelled. We hurriedly reversed quitting our shitty jobs, telling our bosses we’d been joking.

No parties this weekend.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “Big Lagoon” by Thomas Thonson

NEW FICTION!

Oscar scared me in every way, and I was always terrified when Marcel would talk back to him––talk to him with scathing contempt. How could he get away with it? But he did. His father’s bluster was all intellectual. He’d bludgeon you, but it was verbal, a brutal mind game that was vicious and wounding. If something like that had happened in my household, the world would cease to exist, or someone would be dead. Cross this threshold and it was routine. 

They were also savage drinkers and prodigious fuckers, which went hand in hand (ha!). No sooner had a fight ended, when Marcel, his younger sister and I would be sent running from the house so we wouldn’t have to hear their screams and moans. The Big Lagoon house was supposed to be a sylvian setting where the great man could write poetry in relative peace, after a semester of guiding young poets past their masturbatory first verses and into a bit of mature artistry. It was never thus. Three summers in a row and their marriage just got stranger and more volatile. To work off the tension, and after a few gin and tonics, Oscar took to body surfing in the brutal waves along the ocean side of the Big Lagoon shore. Nobody swam in those, chiefly because the beach was so steep that the waves simply came rolling in and then broke right on the sand. A perfect back breaker. Oscar had a unique approach. He didn’t even bother sticking out his arms, he just leaped into the wall of water,  just beneath the cresting lip, with his head. He’d pierce it momentarily only to be dragged back and slammed to the sand. He’d stagger up, shake the water from his shaggy head, and then with the sand running off his beard in rivulets, and a demented look, try another one. It was a wonder he survived.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Promo for Wred Fright’s The Front Yard War

(Editor’s Note: We were going to post another excerpt from the book during lawn season, which is now, then realized how well Wred’s promo for the novel sets up the narrative. Wred Fright is at the forefront of back-to-basics writing and publishing. Keep track of what he’s doing via his blog.)

Jane Carcrashski is getting a divorce. Jane Carcrashski is looking for a new career. Jane  Carcrashski is getting good at hiding her nervous breakdown. But one thing Jane Carcrashski is not doing is cutting the grass. You see, her estranged husband says he’ll do it, and she’s  making sure he keeps his word. Unfortunately, he’s real busy, so he hasn’t had time to do it, but he says he’ll be over tonight. If not tonight, then the next day. OK, maybe this weekend. Well, something came up, so next weekend? 

In the meantime, the grass is growing, and we’re past No Mow May into Angry Neighbors And Government Code Violations June, and Jane is thrust into an armed standoff with local  government goons fueled by a group of misfits drawn to her growing grass including a property rights extremist who maybe only loves his rights slightly more than his guns, a native plants  enthusiast who feels guilty about finding dandelion sandwiches so damn delicious, a yard artist  who thinks Jane’s yard just needs a few more inflatable flamingos and it would look better, and a digital druid who dislikes clothing and insists on live streaming his intense naked conversations with the plants in Jane’s yard. 

Remember the Alamo? Remember Waco? Remember Attica? Remember how the Harpers Ferry raid ended?–Also, remember when Harper’s Ferry used to have an apostrophe? OK, enough digression, let’s get back to the main point–Remember when Philadelphia dropped a  bomb on a bunch of militant vegetarians? 

No? Well, none of those had happy endings. Jane’s still hoping for one here, but that’s only probably because she’s drunk. If you like novels such as The Monkey Wrench Gang, then you’re probably on a government watchlist, but you’ll also likely enjoy reading The Front Yard War!

(The Front Yard War is available at Amazon, ebook or paperback; at Google; or directly from Wred Fright himself by contacting him at wredfrightATyahooDOTcom. Wred is a long-time underground writer– DIY all the way– who’s contributed several fiction features to New Pop Lit, most recently “Fast Guy Slows Down.”)

The Haydn Example

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

(painting: “Haydn In London” by John Hoppner)

THE OTHER DAY while driving someplace I listened to a classical music station. A serious-voiced commentator discussed a Joseph Haydn symphony which premiered in London in 1794. The radio host read from newspaper reviews of the concert, published the day after, which raved about the work, its drama and explosiveness. Then followed a recording of the symphony itself.

The piece was underwhelming. Unexceptional, even dull. Definitely no “Carmina Burana”!

What does that tell us?

Beyond the possibility that the problem was me: Two things.

1.) An art changes. A musical work considered thrilling 230 years ago won’t be looked at the same way today, after many innovations in the classical genre, and especially outside it. Which is the point: peak achievement for one set of critics could appear obsolete at a later date, or another time and place.

2.) The problem may be the critics. Those who wrote the gushy reviews the next day. They represented a sliver of their society. The standard audience size in London at the time for renowned symphonies was 800 persons of refined taste and breeding. Aristocrats and aristocrat wannabes. The critics’ opinions reflected them, not the general population.

Context is everything.

Does a similar situation afflict the U.S. literary world in 2025? The audience may not comprise, at its highest levels, quite as narrow a segment of society as Haydn fans, then or today. But literary writing sure doesn’t speak to a broad swath of society either.

Should it? The stance of the New Pop Lit project says, Yes, it should. Which leaves a canyon-sized hole in the art for writers with imagination and smarts to jump through.

–Karl Wenclas