EVERYBODY for one day was talking about this vehicle.
Most striking to me about the Ferrari Luce (named after the Time-Life founder?) is its price tag: $640,000. For a manufactured automobile. Which places it in line with the $98 million Mark Rothko painting, and the salute-to-wealth Devil Wears Prada movie sequel. Celebrations of money. The top 0.01% isn’t even trying to hide their luxuries, but instead, going in-your-face with them.
Like Mark Zuckerberg’s $330 million super yacht.
The final financial blowoff before a 1929-style crash?
Never mind it’s called the best novels published in English. Do they mean originally in English? No, because there are a scattering of non-English language authors on the list. If they mean, published at some point in English, then foreign-born novelists are ridiculously under-represented. Or, the bias, the skewed viewpoint, is palpable.
The biggest problem with the Guardian’s list, however, is the novel chosen as #1 to be the face of the art form. “Middlemarch.” Not “War and Peace,” whose very name conjures images of the clash of forces, of drama, scope, and excitement. Instead: Middlemarch. The emphasis, as in all decisions of the established literary scene, is on keeping the art isolated from the general public. Can’t interest any of them! Well-placed snobset isolated-in-a-bubble readers only. Literature as snoozefest.
The kind of attitude any new version of literature needs to stand against.
Subject: The essay, “Why Cormac McCarthy Stopped Reading New Novels” by Vincenzo Barney.
best literary site
I’d link to the essay, but it’s paywalled. Unherd (an Orwellian name if there ever was one, because none of them exists outside the literary cattle pen) needs the money! YOU pay for every one of those 9,000 words by Mr. Barney. Subscribe today!
Never mind that the plutocrat who owns Unherd, Sir Paul Marshall, is hugely rich and just invested $70 BILLION-with-a-B in AI. Gotta keep your scam artist tech hustler wannabe-trillionaires going!
APPROPRIATELY, the subject of the 9,000-word essay is verbosity. Words. Production. Output, in the form of two of the wordiest writers who ever lived, Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace. Apex of technocratic insanity. (With a quick shot taken at equally verbose fifty-nine overwritten-novels-and-counting Joyce Carol Oates.)
One can picture what it’d be like if you ever met Cormac and Foster Wallace in real life. The kind of guys who just won’t shut up. KIcking back, mouths flapping an endless barrage of words they don’t care, the guests have fled, stampeded out the front door or snuck out the back: “I’ll return in a minute. Going to the store.” Tires squealing cars roaring away but the two yakkers keep blabbering, enraptured with themselves, captured by their own unstoppable content.
Sure looks like an establishment collapse, anyway. The above two covers are for the two most heavily-hyped literary books of the past two years. Can people not see how bland and neutered the two covers are, as is the writing inside them? Brilliantly fake in one case. Instantly dated in the other. Both written by well-connected bubble-world monoclass authors. “Of the moment,” at least for the Manhattan-Brooklyn trust fund set. They’re akin to the pop music world circa 1955 when rock n’ roll burst onto the scene from beneath. From the hinterlands and underclasses of the American nation: settings not of pampered complacency, but cultural change. Upsetting a status quo that had no edge, no reality, no passion. Like literature today.
How much Big 5 conglomerate marketing money was behind these two books? A million dollars each? There’s no way of knowing, because no arts journalists take an adversarial stance, combined with real investigation into things. If they did, they’d lose their livelihood. The way things have been in the moldy lit scene for decades.
LAST GASP OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA
Never fear! Our literary intellectuals have an answer: the metafiction novel The Tunnel by William Gass, due to be rereleased by Dalkey Archive Press in exactly one month. A novel about a professor, and about his mentor, who’s a professor, and his colleagues, who are professors, and about a book he’s writing, but it’s really two books, and Gass said he made the opening difficult to discourage most readers. Certain to save the art!
The Phd crowd are excited, anyway, if no one else.
STUDY what remains of the established literary scene and you’ll see they have no intention of altering anything about how they think and write. Their standards, their icons, their ideas are set in concrete. Jackhammers couldn’t remove them. They could be living in Ancient Rome. They’re going to tough it out!
WE PLAN to establish, using the New Pop Lit platform as base, our own survival bunker. One focused, though, on changing the art. Using every human-based tool available to soon enough attack the AI-generated avalanche. We’ll be looking for allies.
PROJECT TO MAKE A MOVIE BASED ON A NEW POP LIT STORY
HERE’S the story: “What Does It Cost to Be Civil” by Tom Ray, which ran as a feature at our main site on November 25, 2024. A terrific story. Tom’s daughter, Ina Adele Ray, is now making a film of the story. But the project needs funding. It’s 80% of the way there. Close– but running out of time.
WHY support this project? In this time of conglomerate top-down monopolization of everything, of technology intruding into every aspect of our lives, independent voices are needed now more than ever. Creating counterweights to a dystopian status quo starts with small steps. Like this one!
Read about the Seed & Spark fundraising effort here, and watch the video. Then support this worthy project to any extent possible. Make the movie version of “What Does It Cost to Be Civil?” a reality!
(cover to the French version of a Robert McAlmon memoir about the 1920’s Lost Generation)
TWO THINGS recently caught my attention.
FIRST was a quote from Susan Sontag giving her perspective on articulate writing.
It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little – have few verbal means. Eloquence – thinking in words – is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.
The point of view, clearly, of an introvert. In many ways indicative of the classic stereotype of a literary person. (My own opinion is that facility with language comes with being among people, out in the world, especially in a vocal, even contentious environment. Will Shakespeare, actor, business partner and playwright, is a classic example. When I bartended in a tough Detroit saloon, loud debates and arguments were the norm. Not to mention my days in the loud and contentious writers troupe Underground Literary Alliance.)
THE SECOND literary item which caught my attention was this book review by Ryan Ruby in the Fall 2025 Bookforum, of a biography by Francesca Wade of Gertrude Stein, which embodies current establishment thinking regarding the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920’s. In the essay, Ernest Hemingway receives one dismissive mention. Proto-Beat Robert McAlmon, a central figure of the scene as writer, publisher and motivator, is not even a thought.
The gushing over Gertrude Stein meanwhile is that of a firehose.
(So that’s who we blame!)
WHAT’S GOING ON?
Any excuse is proffered to justify Stein’s inaccessible prose.
But when Wade is confronted by writing she doesn’t understand, curiosity rather than resentment wins the day. As she gets deeper into Stein’s epic, Wade finds herself “hooked by its rhythms” and “eager to follow Stein’s restless sentences as they quest toward conclusion,” an experience she describes as “intoxicating.” Though never credulous toward her notoriously “self-mythologizing” subject, Wade argues that the best way to read Stein is to “trust her.”
(Would Ryan Ruby or Francesca Wade extend the same indulgence toward American populist authors like Erskine Caldwell and Aben Kandel, whose rough-hewn writing styles can be off-putting to refined sensibilities, including, or especially, graduates of Oxford?)
MOST IMPORTANT though to fans of the obscure and difficult is the introvert mindset which dates back to Henry James’ “The Figure in the Carpet”: looking for hidden meanings not available to just anybody. A concept dating back originally to Gnostic Christians, well depicted in Elaine Pagels’ landmark 1979 book on them and their writings. Original introverts, as obsessed with the self as are the promoters of autofiction and alt lit, shutting themselves off from the world. Resting in metaphorical armchairs in Gertrude Stein-style salons. As opposed to those who followed the mindset of Jesus and his crew, who were grounded, spoke and wrote simply, with clarity in Aramaic and working-class Greek, and pushed themselves out into the world. Exclusivity was not their thing. Neither was difficulty. They only changed the world.
NEEDED: Clear-thinking American writers, rough-hewn if necessary, banged-up, knowing too-well the traumas of life but full of ambition and energy, eager to promote their ideas and writing. Needed to announce these writers: new styles of literary criticism, from clear-eyed observers and participants willing to confront alternatives, to try the NEW, and to get right to the point in pursuit of change, relevance and art.
THE HARDEST PART of selecting nominees for compilations like Best of the Net is choosing between many excellent works all of which we love or we wouldn’t have accepted and published them to begin with. Instead of “the best” of our site over a one-year period, maybe it’s better to call them the best examples of what we like and hope to offer readers on a consistent basis. Here, then, are our eight nominees for fiction and poetry for the 2026 Best of the Net anthology, chosen from our New Pop Lit and Fast Pop Lit sites.
When “Shock of the New” artistic change happens, which resets everything involved with an art form, later generations look back at the change as a given. The cultural earthquake becomes an accepted part of the environment. Only if you go back in history to grasp the pre-moment– the world, the art, as it existed before the change– can you understand the full impact.
Such is the case with Ernest Hemingway.
You could say Hemingway was the Beatles of literature. He became the face of a stylistic reinvention of the art– a reinvention now largely discarded by literati– and a role model for that always-endangered animal: male writers. The list of American authors inspired by his success is a long one: J.D. Salinger; James Jones; Irwin Shaw; Norman Mailer, James Baldwin; Gore Vidal; Richard Yates; Herman Wouk, to name several, each of them in pursuit of that elusive prey, the Great American Novel.
ASPECTS OF CHANGE
STYLE: Ernest Hemingway’s compressed, less-is-more writing style was based in part on the innovations of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, but also on his observation of Impressionist painters like Cezanne, who could create an image and capture a moment in time with a few brush strokes. Give the right detail and the observer’s brain fills in the rest.
Hemingway applied the same principle to writing. (As would under-appreciated French detective writer Georges Simenon.) The goal: more sense of immediacy; increased intensity.
Ernest Hemingway made writing look easy– when his technique was anything but. The minimalists of the 1980’s were, for the most part, a caricature of the Hemingway style. Not to mention most pop detective fiction! See Mickey Spillane. Simenon without the humanity.
The trick when assessing Hemingway’s work is treating it as a starting point, not an end point. He opened a door that other writers– including today’s writers– need to jump through.
DESIGN: Ernest Hemingway was, like his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, a student of overall narrative design, most evident in his two famous short stories of the 1930’s, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
The former artfully switches viewpoints throughout, from Margaret Macomber to Wilson the big game hunter, to Francis Macomber. At one point the story enters the viewpoint of a lion! Masterful.
PERSONA: The 1920’s, care of the Lost Generation of expat writers in France and Spain, is looked back at as the most glamorous period of American writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway– public figures both– were as celebrated as rock stars. A large part of this was the swaggering Hemingway persona. The two, in different ways, made writers cool again, as they hadn’t been since Byron. The literary scene became exciting.
Ernest Hemingway ended up as big, or bigger, a cultural figure as pop singers, athletes, and movie stars.
Donald Trump’s letter to Japan about tariffs is generating scorn from his critics and embarrassed silence from his fans. Is it written in diplomatic language? Obviously not! But the writing style reflects Trump’s decades as a P.T. Barnum-style promoter and his over-the-top personality. I call it Ballyhoo Style, where the purpose of the many capitalizations and blunt, sometimes grammatically incorrect language is to grab the reader’s attention.
It reminds me of punk flyers of the 1980’s, or zine missives of the 1990’s. When handling promotion for the Underground Literary Alliance in the 2000’s, I wrote and distributed many one-page broadsides written in a similar style– but they included large hand-written magic marker titles to further emphasize the point.
Appropriate for a President of the United States? One thing positive we can say about it is it’s not composed by AI!
The decorum of the Office has been long ago shattered– blown apart– by the man. My concern is decorum in today’s literary world, and whether or not we should continue to cling to it.
Will Shaksper aka William Shakespeare, who lived in a more creative time, never worried overmuch about proper grammar and spelling. But he wasn’t the only one. Take a glance at thetext of the Declaration of Independence and you’ll find more than a few capitalizations as well. (Do ya think they were trying to grab the reader’s attention?)
THE PROBLEM with now is we live in a constipated, overregulated time where rules are all– especially in the literary field; these rules pounded into us through every level of schooling. CONFORM! is the underlying message. The rule of technocracy. For writers, it often means a lack of freedom, energy, verve– and an inability to grab the attention of most readers and would-be readers. Donald Trump has too many problems to list, and may indeed be on his way toward destroying this democracy and possibly civilization itself. But let us at least acknowledge he didn’t gain popularity with masses of Americans by not knowing how to communicate to them!
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