Author: collabnovel

They’re Going Down with the Ship!

AN ANALYSIS

(engraving by Willy Stower)

THE MOST TELLING aspect of today’s literary scene is even the most loyal servants to the status quo system are barely making it. Having to edit, and struggle to promote, their generic Substacks while paying outrageous rents in the Imperial City of New York.

Yet they refuse to leave the ship’s bridge! Rigidly adhering to their obsolete “high modern” standards though the ship of Literature lists at an ever sharper angle, waiting to slide beneath the waves, into the depths.

(image c/o matskodotcom)

“Oh Captain My Captain,” they recite. But who is the captain? Has he already left?

Is it establishment attack dog Gerald Howard, who recently proclaimed in the New York Times that literary fiction is not dead? Or has snarky Gerry already hopped into a lifeboat, wearing a dress?

Some remaining crew still believe they can make it in academia care of doctoral certificates and question-nothing mindsets. Yet Humanities positions dwindle, staffs shrink, lofty Ivy-covered towers themselves begin to sink. Who’ll be added to the growing casualty list? Do we add now the Ryan Ruby Fifty– those “golden age” critics who by following the rules were supposed to rescue the art? Will any escape?

What course to follow for other writers?

The smart ones are already in lifeboats labelled “New Ideas” and “New Styles,” rowing through raging waters toward smaller but safer ships. NOT top-heavy unwieldy overloaded vessels, but of a kind able to maneuver toward more stable-but-enticing shores: the new literary world ahead.

-K.W.

“Would You Rather” by Anne Marie DiStefano

NEW FICTION

(c/o hiltondotcom)

My career as a Seattle restaurateur has really taken off. A food magazine recently referred to me as “the grande dame of the Northwest dining scene.”

On a dark gray day, in the pouring rain, you pull up outside my flagship restaurant in a brand-new black Corvette. When you roll down the window, my employees recognize your distinguished profile and say, “It’s him! He’s back!” 

I take off my apron and hand it to my manager. I get in on the passenger side. You tell the car’s voice-activated navigation system to find the freeway on ramp, and we speed south down I-5.

We spend the first night at the Benson Hotel in Portland. The pillars in the lobby are made of Circassian oak, and the floors are marble. We reserve one of the suites, and have dinner in the steakhouse. People turn their heads when they see us together, because they know who we are.

The next morning, we find that the car has turned into a Mercedes. It’s still raining, but the sky is brighter, colors are more vivid, and everything seems less blurry. We spend the second night at the historic Ashland Springs Hotel. We taste the lithia water and eat dinner in a restaurant with a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme.

By the time we leave the Travelodge in San Francisco, our car has become a Honda hatchback, and we listen to classic rock on the radio. On the steep rise of the Grapevine, the car gradually loses speed, and it shivers every time we’re passed by the hulking, honking semi trucks. We have a friend who’s going to UCLA and she lets us crash on her dorm room floor for the night.

We cross the border into Mexico in our VW Bug. We have to stop to top off the oil, but the engine doesn’t overheat. After asking for directions several times, we finally find our way to a place at the end of a dirt road where they rent hammocks and you can sleep on the beach. That night, we hear whales breathing in the warm shallow water of the Sea of Cortez. In the morning our car is gone. We have no way to get back. We’re two sunburned kids sitting on the hot sand, playing “would you rather” and trying to figure out how we are going to pay for breakfast.

(photo c/o daltonjohnsondotcom)

Anne Marie DiStefano was, until recently, the owner of the Lucky Horseshoe Lounge in Portland, Oregon. She has owned a historic movie theater and worked as a freelance journalist and as a columnist for The Portland Tribune. She studied English literature at Reed College and Oxford University.

New Pop Lit’s Editor Appears in Frighty #3!

BIG LITERARY NEWS

IN THE BIG PUSH back to humanity and reality, Wred Fright‘s new zine Frighty is at the forefront.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Halloween season, with smashed pumpkins and out-of-control squirrels everyplace, it’s appropriate that another issue of Frighty— #3-– appears on the scene.

Does the pumpkin on the cover foretell the fate of the established literary realm?

One thing for certain is the zine is filled with terrific writing nowhere else to be seen: new work from Markell R. West, Pat King, The Midnight Rider; articles about Morrissey and ducks in jeeps, and other cool stuff.

HERE’S Wred’s own write-up of the issue’s debut, which explains how it can be easily obtained, for free!

(In the 19th century, what were in effect zines of the day were “Beneath the American Renaissance,” in David S. Reynold’s famous phrase. Today, are they beneath American decline? Or an escape– or rescue– from it? Is another renaissance coming?)

“Trump’s New Ballroom”

NEW FICTION

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, I know, editors aren’t supposed to run their own work on their litmags, but I do it anyway. You might say I’m the Donald Trump of this modest little literary site.)

He dreamt of a ballroom.

A big ballroom. BIG. In capitals.

An actual dream.

He’d first had the dream at age twelve. Or maybe seventeen, when he was a cadet at a military academy, sleeping in a dorm. A lonely time.

A vivid dream. The dream said, “Build the ballroom.”

But he’d had the first dream when he was twelve and his father took him to a big, beautiful hotel in Manhattan, or maybe Paris, or Zurich, and the hotel had a large ballroom. He’d seen ballrooms before, but not like this ballroom.

He’d said to himself, age twelve, looking at it, “That is one big beautiful ballroom.”

That night in the hotel he had a dream about a ballroom, not just any ballroom. HIS. Which meant it was the biggest most beautiful ballroom anyone had ever seen.

Now he was building his dream ballroom. Finally at last. The Big One. At the White House, which he now owned. Because he was the President.

Oh, he knew, everyone told him– aides he could fire with a move of his little finger– “But you don’t own it. You live in it but you don’t own it.”

But he owned it. He was the President and he owned it. And so he was changing it, to make it the most beautiful White House with the biggest most beautiful ballroom ever seen. It was why he’d become President, he realized. The motivation. To build the ballroom.

“Don’t put that pillar over there!” he yelled at a foreman in a white hard hat.

You knew who the foremen were because they wore white hard hats, not blue ones. Or yellow ones.

“Read the blueprints! Doesn’t anyone read blueprints? And don’t connect the copper wiring to the glass wiring. Do not do that. They don’t connect. You do not connect them!”

Sheesh! he said to himself.

Aides scurried around him and moved him in different directions, but they didn’t know. Only he knew. KNEW.

Which is why he was President.

Tractors roared, earth moved, wings of the White House crumbled before his eyes, concussions and visions of noise and chaos, and he loved it because he knew when it was over, the project complete– tiles gleaming and gold statues positioned everywhere and the richest, wealthiest most famous guests, trillionaires and kings– he knew, KNEW, all the effort would result and had resulted in the world’s biggest and most beautiful ballroom.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “Of Music and Men” by Jeff Nazzaro

NEW FICTION

Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it. I take my book, an Alice Munro collection, out of my bag, open it to the next story, “Free Radicals.” Then I realize I’m standing in the doorway on the side of the train on which at each stop the doors will open, so I gather up my bag and slide across the aisle to stand in the opposite doorway. Two seconds later, the man who had repeatedly looked at me jumps up out of his seat and stands right beside me. 

He stands very close to me, looking straight ahead. But whatever. It’s a free train. I take my book out, open it back up. “Free Radicals,” here we go. As I read the opening lines, the man standing next to me takes out his phone and with it plays some hip-hop at top volume. I stand there. I’ll admit I had wanted to move when the man first jumped up and stood next to me, because there seemed to be no good reason for him to have done it, but I thought it wouldn’t be polite to move. I still have those thoughts sometimes, even after years of this commute. Now I know he’s fucking with me and has been ever since he hopped on the train just before the doors closed. Is it the jacket? The tie? I don’t know. My face?

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Hello, My Name Is” by James Croal Jackson

NEW POETRY

(publicdomainpicturesdotnet)

Hello, my name is Hello.
Yes, it rhymes with yellow,

mellow, Jell-O. You know.
I don’t talk much, I just drink.

Put me in a taxi, call me Buddy,
take me anywhere. I don’t care.

Home is the bottom of a bottle,
the last drop a farewell kiss

before I blast into space,
my veins full of rocket fuel.

Can you turn down the heat?
My tongue’s a rag dipped in oil.

What do you say, candle?
You are my only friend

in this dark room.
My words are an old car

that won’t start. A clunk here,
a sputter there. I need a tune-up,

a shot of WD-40 for the rusty hinge
of my mouth. I walk these streets

a ghost, invisible to everyone.
Don’t pretend you know me.

You don’t know my name.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. His latest chapbook is A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023). Recent poems are in ITERANT, Stirring, and The Indianapolis Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com)

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!