New Pop Lit

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!

“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!

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

Magic Bullet Theory Applied to Literature

AN EXPERIMENT IN APPLIED IDEAS

THE ODDS against easily solving the dilemmas the literary art finds itself in may well be astronomical. The question is: what are the alternatives? Continued artistic stagnation– writers recycling in tired variations the already been done? Domination of book markets by floods of AI literary slop care of hustlers producing hundreds of bot books, saturating Amazon and other outlets with their crap then bragging about it? A Big Five publishing establishment as devoid of ideas as the movie business, pushing out millions of copies of variations of generic fantasy, covering everything from medieval knights to space sorcerers, to unreal romances relying on caricatured situations and plots?

The solution is Breakout. Shock of the New. Creating a story or novel so different, accessible or exciting it will overturn the status quo literary world. But: how to do that?

FOUR TACTICS

1.) CLARITY. In this hectic age the writer no longer has the luxury of self-indulgence via endless sentences and paragraphs. The reader needs to be grabbed as quickly as possible through a sense of–

2.) IMMEDIACY. Stunning action or emotion from the first page. With an overarching sense of–

3.) RELEVANCE. Call it ideas, call it politics or polemics, the new story and novel need to be part of the culture’s greater conversation. Literature needs to matter. Recognition of reality– of social happenings which affect every one of us. This is no time to remain locked within aesthetic bubbles, a coterie of the insulated and protected, not recipients of economic body blows inflicted on the bulk of the public. NOT witnesses up-close-and-personal to class war including attacks on immigrants, the poor, the disabled and the homeless.

In 2012 I wrote an ambitious novel, The Tower, which sought to portray the beginnings of American disorder and collapse, depicting a variety of social and economic classes; influenced by the Occupy protests of 2011, as well as several previous experiences. A narrative of impending chaos.

4.) MULTIPLE VIEWPOINTS. The advantage of multiple viewpoints, whether used casually as in The Tower, or at a quick switching pace as in my political novella The Loud Boys, is to present a rounded view of a society or situation. To break out of the narrow linear “autofiction” perspective of so much of today’s literary writing. Removing tunnel vision in order to showcase an entire world.

Every one of these four components needs to work together, maximized, to create a breathtaking reading experience.

A path forward. Opportunity awaits! For the aggressive and the ambitious.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “On the Dance Floor” by Leah Browning

NEW FICTION

That night in bed, when she placed one leg over his and began sliding her palm over his chest, he put his hand over hers and rose a little, giving her a decisive peck on the cheek before turning over with his back to her and making a big show of arranging his pillows just so. 

He heard her sigh and turn over. Good. The next day, he would start looking at rentals. He couldn’t face another six months of couch-surfing, as he’d done after the breakup with his previous girlfriend. He’d worn out his welcome with various friends and their girlfriends, not to mention that they’d worn out their welcome with him. They were all so deferential, with their bran flakes for breakfast and their “Emily wouldn’t like that”-type comments. What were they doing with their lives? It was sickening, if you asked him.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

On Difficult Writing

AN ANALYSIS

ONE THING I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD

is why some writers praise difficult writing. “Let’s get inaccessible!”

What’s the rationale? The reason– if there is a reason? The logic? “Well, team, we have these much-lauded many-layered canonical books by our favorite snobby novelists, they’re very difficult— a slog really, like swimming through mud– but that’s the point! No one can get through them. Only us! Which makes us special. A breed apart. Class distinctions and all that.”

The literary mandarins congratulate themselves in an upper room of the moldy, falling apart literary tower. A high-up, far removed room which is actually a closet. A well-furnished closet, mind you, with imported French wine with subtle bouquets, delicate-tasting English pastries, and crackers with brie. Anything an out-of-touch snob set could need. No windows in the room– it’s airless and stuffy– but they don’t want windows anyway. No windows! They don’t care to know what’s happening . . . out there.

Mad leaders open-air prisons wars mobs refugee removals ruthless tech moguls pushing insane AI gadgets as populations potential audiences become angrily detached and illiterate. Increasing levels of gloom. Stray assassinations and nascent revolutions. Not their concern!

As long as the pastries arrive on time and they’re able to take a few sips of overpriced wine while they cling to the overlong overwrought volumes of overdone writing constructed via endless sentences and paragraphs so that no one other than they, them— the last literary aristocrats, cultural dinosaurs– can appreciate them.

–Karl Wenclas

“Blue in Green” by Ben Macnair

NEW POETRY

c/o coloredvinylrecordsdotcom

It is 3am in the morning,
in a student house.
Someone is playing an old Jazz LP,
but it means nothing to them.
They are just playing it,
because they think they have to.
The students are out reading poetry.
They talk about their journey,
and their voice,
and how 40 year old poetry is really, really,like cool,
but Shakespeare is nothing to them,
because they forgot about him when they left school.

Miles played Blue in Green,
in the 1950’s, but it still speaks to me.
More than the students whose voices are new,
digging away at the same old ground.
For all of their talk of breaking boundaries,
they are getting headaches from banging
their young heads against old walls,
and in a few years, when new students come,
and talk about their journey, and their voice,
Miles will still talk to me,
because there is something to be said
for keeping it simple.

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

An Excerpt from “Fame and Fortune” by Alan Swyer

NEW FICTION

Despite the lingering sense that he’d been conned, duped, or sold a bill of goods – the exact term depended on his feelings at a given moment – Jeff found himself not merely adjusting to Southern California life, but actually enjoying it. Having lucked into an apartment a block and-a-half from the beach in a still somewhat funky part of Venice, he loved the climate, which allowed him to run or bike at dawn on Ocean Front walk without encountering sleet, hail, or  horrendous humidity. He got a kick out of being in a place that had more yoga teachers than Mumbai, as well as ubiquitous Pilates studios, gyms big and small, and even a place called  Stretchlab. And he marveled at the restaurants catering to diets unheard of on his home turf. Though he had encountered vegetarian before, he hadn’t been aware of Ethiopian vegetarian, or  multiple examples of paleo, keto, gluten-free, Atkins, plus something called Zone. 

As for the infamous LA traffic, it only became a bother when, in a used Camry that made his cousin cringe, he had to make an emergency run to Children’s Hospital on the eastern edge  of Hollywood. 

In the low-rise Santa Monica office he shared with his cousin, the division of labor was clear. Steve treated the offspring of the “high-ranking industry folk,” while Jeff tended to the sons and daughters of what were termed “the civilians.” 

That, Jeff quickly came to realize, meant that he was spared the fawning, pandering, and  indulging that Steve felt provided the pathway to the success. 

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Human Innovation

Our assistant editor and style consultant, Kathleen M. Crane, to me as we watched the original 1968 Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway version of “The Thomas Crown Affair”:

“This reminds me of The Loud Boys.”

Near the beginning of the film, plot events happen simultaneously. The movie uses extreme split-screen techniques of the kind first shown at the 1967 Montreal Worlds Fair. No doubt it works best on giant movie screens. The film– influenced by the French New Wave and by neo-noir films like “Point Blank”– was trying to be the epitome of editing, design, and style. A worthy objective.

IS THAT our objective at New Pop Lit?

WHY INNOVATE?

In this mad accelerated world with everything in a state of flux, literature has no choice but to innovate, or become little more than a handful of arrogant monks in a remote monastery on the edge of civilization– a few last holdouts– while what remains of the publishing world is a trash mountain of generic, AI-generated bot books pushed out by the mirror-imaged “Big Five,” which based on how closely they resemble one another in structure, mentality, staffs and output is really a Big One.

(image c/o The New Yorker.)

Never have more choices been offered, with every choice exactly the same.

The only real choice in 2025?

To stand out!

Which we’ve begun doing using multidimensional writing combined with a hyper-pop vibe, as demonstrated in the novella, The Loud Boys. Available here.

-Karl Wenclas