American writers

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!

Zines Are Back!

PRINT-ZINE REVIVAL?

HAVE DIY and analog returned? Why not! Grass roots Do-It-Yourself art has always been the best answer to the monopolistic-conglomerate domination of our culture– among the worst offenders in that regard being publishing’s Big Five.

Authentic culture is organic. Always has been. We’ve had a glimpse of this recently via the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” whose focus was the folk music revival of the 1960’s. One of the roots music pioneers depicted was Woody Guthrie.

Roots literature has had its own pioneers, among them the writer-chronicler known as Wred Fright, a key voice and thinker during the zine heyday of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

The latest news: Wred has produced his first zine in years! The start of a zine revival? We hope!

Information on easily obtaining the zine, Frighty #1, is available right here.

“There Where the Weather” by Christopher Landrum

NEW POETRY

(photo c/o ancientpages.com)

The pages of sages

Down through the ages

Are plucked ripe with luck and Logos by mages

Who then hand unfair fistfuls of gifts to readers most unusually unsquare,

Containing uncanny answers for listening listeners who dare:

Answers dressed in pinstriped ribbons and gild-paper wrapping

That (once ripped open) tap into a kind of magical (but muddled) time travel

Full of hap, riddles, and knots to unravel

By those lost in the love of farming

Fresh vines grown from wild languages

Amid all uncertainties, tangles, and anguishes,

Farmed there where the weather marks the least of all changes.

Christopher Landrum’s story “The Age of Insomnia” was featured at our main site. He lives in Austin, Texas and writes about what he reads at Bookbread.com.

7 Questions Every Literary Historian Should Be Able to Answer

SEVEN LITERARY QUESTIONS

1.) Who was the most influential post-World War II American novelist?

2.) Which famed literary publication was founded with Random House money as a corporate ad vehicle during a major newspaper strike?

3.) Which canonical author’s cousin headed a Cold War CIA-front arts organization designed to steer literature into safe directions?

4.) Which innovative writer was once left by American soldiers in a cage on an airport tarmac in the hot sun, for hours?

5.) Which American populist novelist, forerunner of the Beats, went from being an acclaimed author to writing screenplays for low-budget monster movies?

6.) Which literary critic, after writing a scathing article in the Atlantic about the pretentiousness of American literary fiction, received a torrent of vitriol and denunciations from book reviewers, novelists, and corporate publishing power brokers? (The person currently lives in South Korea.)

7.) Which over-the-top pulp novel was praised by both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud for exploring realms of the unconscious?

(Please give your answers below.)