Author: collabnovel

Counter Culture Madness!

FRIGHTY #2 IS OUT!

EVENTUALLY the internet will become unusable, buried under ads, pop-ups, paywalls, tests to prove you’re human or maybe that you’re not, and other security and-or moneymaking techniques. When that happens there will need to be escape routes back to sanity and reality– back to the groundedness once provided by Do-It-Yourself print zines.

As usual, Wred Fright is ahead of the curve in such matters, the first escape routes already provided c/o his new Frighty series. #2 has arrived, full of the kind of human writing that will never be offered by robotic machines. In fact, the authentic kind of zine writing offered would cause AI devices and robots of all kinds to blow fuses– “This does not compute!”– because it breaks the refined “rules” of what writing is supposed to look like.

ON TOP of all else, Dr. Fright is offering it to the public FREE. Print it out– here!

“Just download it, print it doublesided (flip on short edge), fold, and maybe bind/staple it, and it is good to go!”

(BONUS: It includes a short rant by myself.) 

-Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop Lit 

“Ubi Est?” by John Zedolik

NEW POETRY!

(photo by RiddiMRyder)

The town’s pizza joint that once held primacy of place
moved long ago and now rules across the road and down aways,
and if you didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t sense a trace

of the hearty business that used to flourish in this space,
now a blocky cipher that dreams in its latter days
among the dark hemlocks in this bypassed place,

whose needles weave stark shadows, and the walls enlace,
perhaps a proper end in which the elder can laze,
and the long course of its catastrophe, trace

as eighth-century monks might ponder the disgrace
of men in God’s crimson eye as the Norsemen raze
their chapels, bell towers, and every holy place,

why the clanking ovens no longer grace
its innards with a comforting blaze
and the aroma of dough has vanished without a trace,

but perhaps it’s better not to keep apace
of these migrations, no need to craze
the benign, brooding senior in his place,
hiding on a street, both long faded to just a trace.

(photo by MJ Barnes)

John Zedolik an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in many journals– including previously at our main site, here.

“Rock Star!” by Cynthia Bernard

NEW SATIRE!

Apparently the inspiration came to the president at the campaign-style rally he held to mark his 100th day in office. 

Four days later, he called a press conference and declared that he had received a proclamation from On High. He had missed his true calling and needed to change course. He told the world that he had no choice but to accept this, regardless of the consequences. Then he tore off his suit jacket and red silk tie, unbuttoned his shirt almost to his navel (revealing several gold chains), picked up a florescent yellow electric guitar, planted his feet, strummed an F-chord, and began to bellow.

Some of his most rabid supporters were devastated and could barely contain their grief. They wore black, tore their sleeves, stopped washing their hair, and held “wakes” and “funerals,” including processions and mock obituaries. Some of them spread rumors on social media that the real president had been abducted, was being held captive in a South American prison, and had been replaced by a look-alike from the opposition party. Belief in that theory spread quite widely.

There were those who were secretly thrilled. A rock star, how awesome! They knew all along that he would conquer the world; music was a much more interesting weapon-of-domination than politics.

And some of us were just delighted at his abdication… at least at first, until we realized who would be stepping up into the role.

Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her early 70s, a long-time classroom teacher and an emerging writer of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, BULL, The Seattle Star, Piker Press, Antipodean SF, Medicine and Meaning, and Verse-Virtual. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.

An Excerpt from “Ghost In the Machine” by Andie Weber

UPCOMING FICTION

C. Ryan: AfterLife is truly groundbreaking, not just on a technological level, but on a philosophical one too. Individuals can set up profiles at any time in advance of their passing, the earlier the better. By feeding in text logs, emails, and even phone recordings, we can replicate the conversation patterns of the user such that, after death, they can continue to communicate with loved ones—at least as long as there’s a valid card on file. Now, you don’t have to say goodbye.

When she heard about AfterLife, Holly signed up immediately. It was almost a year since Steven died, and her life still felt as unmoored as it had in those first days. But the program promised connection, support, and most importantly, closure. She signed onto the computer that Steven had left—the only one they’d had in the house since she’d never really felt the need for one before—and made an AfterLife account. She checked off approval of the terms and conditions without reviewing the attached 60-page file. The portal prompted her to provide texts, emails, chat logs, phone recordings, voicemails. She didn’t have the password to Steven’s email, and she’d gotten rid of his phone, unable to look at it without thinking of the horrible messages he’d gotten from his classmates. So she provided what little she retained—a couple of essays he’d written for school gathering digital dust in the computer’s file folders, and some texts that she had saved to her phone, and she proceeded with a certain amount of hope that the program could still work the kind of miracle she’d been promised.

She quickly realized it was not to be. Her first message, delivered to her phone an hour after the algorithm had the opportunity to work over the data and establish a persona, left her cold, jaw agape at a text that had to be some kind of cruel joke.

Steven Petersen: sup bitch

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Wild” by Hal Wright

NEW POETRY

(painting by Frederic Remington)

We came to this place,
crowded with stingers and rattles and fangs,
because we too had chaos in us
That miffed chainsaw buzz
booming in our brains

Let me tell you what it was like:
the discontented, the outcast, the felon, the dreamer
discordant with society
living by our own hands, and just barely.

A fist in the jaw hello,
A tenth whisky goodnight.
Gunshots pop down Main like little shouts of joy
Hell, why didn’t everybody go West?

The Tetons stand on the cloud’s shoulders
If you chew a scoop of earth, you’ll chip a tooth on gold.
If this wasn’t Shangri-La,
Surely it was the next hamlet over.

But who needs Big Rock Candy
When we got this sunset?
And when the horizon gulps the glow—
Jesus! Ain’t we got stars!

***

Hal Wright (he/him) is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, The Hunger, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day”

RELEVANT FICTION

“A day late and a dollar short” as the old expression– possibly dating to Fitzgerald’s time– says.

TWO occurrences motivated this post, both involving New Pop Lit‘s Contributing Editor Kathleen M. Crane.

First was her inability to find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night at any local library. A few libraries, we discovered, don’t carry any of Fitzgerald’s books. Second, Kathleen recently was at a physical therapist’s for a lingering knee injury. In talking to a young employee, Kathleen mentioned that we hoped to soon make an excursion up to northern Michigan’s Hemingway Country, staying at a hotel where he once lived and frequenting his hangouts. The therapist looked perplexed, had never heard of him.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald: the one-time glamor boys of American literature. Literary rock stars. Throughout our time growing up and discovering ourselves as writers in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, for Kathleen and I, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were the two larger-than-life figures of the art, combining charismatic personalities and compelling biographies with sparkling literary talent and an involvement in the greater world. Models for what American writers should be doing now.

An example of Fitzgerald’s involvement in the world was his 1920 novella, May Day— a multiple-viewpoint depiction of long-forgotten events on May 1, 1919, when anarchist demonstrations and riots, spear-headed by World War I army veterans, took place in cities across America. Fitzgerald ably weaves glimpses of the New York City riots with more personal stories– in his uniquely romantic literary prose style. The result? A multi-dimensional reading experience combining the “literary” with pop sensibility and a topical, here-and-now story. History-come-alive. Innovation, relevance, and style.

WHY can’t we produce this kind of work in 2025?

Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit

An Excerpt from “Crypto” by Jonathan Stone

UPCOMING FICTION

This was a brain on fire. He’s seen plenty of brains on fire before. His own brain has always been a little on fire, too, and that’s how he’s sitting in this family office with fifteen employees overlooking the Pacific now. Okay, kid’s clearly brilliant. The question is always, which brains on fire do you go with, and which ones do you get as far from the flame as possible? After an hour, Mark couldn’t take it anymore. Got up, shook the kid’s hand, wished him luck, and dialed late into the board meeting of a steel mill in Louisiana they own a thirty percent stake of. 

That night, though, he thought about Ahmet’s pitch again. It’s not that he recognized some of his own original ambition and eagerness and raw smarts in the kid – in fact he didn’t recognize much of anything about the kid – but the markets were at a carnival stage right then, crazy winds blowing through the circus tent, canvas flapping wildly, and he’d hate to miss the carnival entirely. So Mark called him – you can call anyone anytime, if you’re giving them seed money. Okay, what the hell, Ahmet. A lot of what you said makes sense. Some of it doesn’t, but maybe that doesn’t even matter right now. I’m good for three mil, and I’ll set you up with a couple associates of mine, we’ll help you get the fund to fifty to get us out of the gate. 

Whereupon, Ahmet bought a ton of stuff that tanked instantly. Told you so, Mark was thinking. But Ahmet used a big portion to buy cryptocurrencies, which was outside the fund charter, drawing the instant ire of Mark’s fellow investors, who all simmered down as the crypto investment climbed, then soared.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“Train Life” by Ben Macnair

NEW POETRY

It is a question of economics
where the price you pay gives you the best seat,
and the best seat gives you the best experience.


Train Life


It is a question of timing
where we will not announce platform changes
until three minutes before a train reaches you,
and the new platform is a full pelt run away


Train Life


It is question of chance as to whether or not
your carriage contains a group of school children in a shouting competition
or your carriage contains a group of babies in a crying competition
or a group of teenagers looking for like, an easy like man, stereotype.


Train Life


The man opposite you is raising his eyebrows,
his flares his nostrils as Lisa from accounts tells everyone
she is on the train.


Train Life


All the people.
So many people,
wanting to get home,
or to work so they can afford a home.


Train Life


reading the newspaper,
hoping for something other than
the same clowns in charge,


Train Life


leaves on the line
cold, insipid tea,
frost on the windows,
and the muffled clap of gloved hands,
the shuffle step of cold feet,
and an announcement saying the next train
is delayed for another ten minutes.


Train Life. . .

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and play-wright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair.

“Mandala” by M.C. Schmidt

NEW FICTION

(image c/o the independent)

There’s a photograph from the 1990s of a city salt truck turned onto its side in a snowy ditch. Those who were there will recall it from glossy posters and keychains and silkscreened t-shirts. It was a bumper sticker on the Ford Escorts of that generation’s first high school girlfriends, the ones who picked up mothers’ sons and returned home men of certain experiences.  

The popularity of the image came from its accidental perfection of storytelling: the history of the truck in tire skids; the driver’s panicked face as he leaned on the mound of salt gravity had evacuated from his vehicle. It spoke to our universal lack of control. The futility of man preserved in one lucky shot.  

It was an image powerful enough to drive my parents to divorce and put my father permanently out of work. He was thirty-six the night he turned over that truck, the same as I am now. He entered the ditch with his bloodstream meff’d on Alival, Tryptanol, and the thorny bloom of gas station Wild Irish Rose. Three decades on, my own bloodstream sometimes begs for similar potions.  

I’ve come to regard the photo as a kind of mandala—the ditch that represents the whole tight universe I’m destined to occupy. It’s a mnemonic to remind me just how badly the world can treat you. And because it’s been there to warn me, I’ve never been surprised—that I’m not as smart as I’d like, that I’m fatter than I was and thinner than I’ll be, that I’m under-employed, -sexed, and -appreciated. On and on.

There was a lack of fanfare when your mother left me, because I always assumed I’d end up alone. (And, in case you’re sentimental and believe it’s better to have loved and lost, I’ll remind you that when Tennyson wrote those words, he had a mortgage and health problems and was in desperate need of cash. He knew, as all desperate people do, that there’s no limit to the amount we’ll pay to pretend our second act will be better than our first. See, as evidence, those recent Frasier and Sex and the City reboots.)  

So, why am I telling you this? Because you’re my son, and you should hear it from me: time is a flat circle. It pains me to say, but gramp-gramp’s failures, and mine, will be your failures too. The die has already been cast and, I’m sorry to say, little dude, that die is loaded against you. Welcome to the ditch. 

That’s all I wanted to say. Okay, go on now. Have a good first day at school. Daddy loves you, kid.

****

M.C. Schmidt‘s recent short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Southern Humanities Review, EVENT, Coolest American Stories 2024, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022) and the forthcoming short story collection, How to Steal a Train (Anxiety Press, 2025). He appeared previously at our main site, with the entertaining story, “We Love You, Ringo.”