Author: newpoplitnews

“What Does It Cost to Be Civil?”

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AN INDY FILMMAKER NEEDS OUR HELP!

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!

Literary Introverts Versus Extroverts

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AN ONGOING BATTLE

(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.

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Our Best of the Net

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THIS YEAR’S NOMINATIONS

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.

FICTION

“The Memorial” by Brent King. Published on 10/4/2024.

An excellent story, filled with compassion and humanity.

“Ghost in the Machine” by Andie Weber. Published on 5/23/2025.

Well-written, imaginative, timely and topical.

POETRY

Poetry is a more indefinable art, with appeal to the senses and the intellect but also the subconscious. Here are our six choices.

“Facial Recognition” by John Zedolik. Published on 7/12/2024 (third of four poems).

“Man Shouts” by James Croal Jackson. Published on 8/8/2024.

“To the Editor” by Nancy Byrne Iannucci. Published on 9/20/2024.

“unprocessed thoughts” by Bach Le. Published on 10/8/2024.

“There Where the Weather” by Christopher Landrum. Published on 11/5/2024.

“On the Killing of Brian Thompson and the Coronation of Luigi Mangione” by Bud Sturguess. Published on 6/19/2025.

Reactions? Disagreements? Thoughts? Feel free to respond!

How Ernest Hemingway Reinvented the Literary Game

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AN ANALYSIS

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.

(image c/o Everett)

Can Ernest Hemingway be a model for writers now?

You won’t find a better one!

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Ballyhoo Writing Style

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OR: THE FIRST PUNK PRESIDENT?

(photo c/o zobiedotcom)

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 the text 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!

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Achieving Artistic Breakthrough

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EVERYONE involved with today’s literary scene knows the art is in trouble. Complaints pour in from every direction. “Not enough male readers!” “The New Yorker story is overwritten!!” “Genre fiction is all the same!!!”

Proposed solutions to the problem are tepid at best. Needed: drastic change in the art itself to better connect literature to the general public. To wake people up. To shock the world like a sudden surge of electrical current leading to artistic and cultural–

BREAKTHROUGH!

To get to that point, all received wisdom– every stale assumption about what is-or-isn’t allowable– needs to be set aside. Prevailing prescriptions for the health of the literary art don’t work.

THE STATUS QUO

The problem with approved literary intellectuals is they know only one direction. They pursue it relentlessly, under the influence of their literary gods and icons. The Approved Canonical Works: texts written as if existing within a narrow corridor, the narratives trapped, unable to escape. The reader follows the verbiage as it travels along, constricted, words following words, then more words. Where is it headed? What does it mean?

Professors are employed full-time at universities to explain what it means, along with esteemed critics– stuffed and mounted on metaphorical walls– at highly touted stuffy publications, and you can only say in response to their explanations, “Makes sense, I guess?” Bullied to accept every part of it, because, after all, these are the experts. Authorities. A circle of approval perpetuating itself like a clock, existing without independent thought.

But those approved tomes haven’t connected to your life or the ongoing life of the society around you. They haven’t moved or enlightened you and they certainly haven’t entertained you.

When it comes to saving literature, the only credible solution is to turn pop into art– or art into pop.

BUT HOW?

Our primary idea has been pop-lit: the fusion of popular writing with the “literary” to create an all-new hybrid reflecting the best of both styles. Going a step beyond that, more recently we’ve been working on “hyper-pop” multiple viewpoint stories in order to achieve a quicker, quirkier, more 3-D effect. (See, for one example, the novella The Loud Boys.) Impetus for this is our belief that anyone who can radically change the art of fiction, improving the reading experience, will own the future of the art.

We see the New Pop Lit project as an Innovation Island, but without the crutch– the necessity– of new electronic technology. THAT innovation wave has peaked, and is showing signs (AI) of increasing desperation to keep the investment bubble backing it inflated.

Better: A new wave of creativity based on long dormant human-centered innovation.

WAVE THEORY

Most people in this mad technocratic world are indoctrinated from birth into a linear mindset. One step followed by another. This includes a progressive, linear view of history. They’re unaware of the concept of waves, articulated by Nikolai Kondratieff, Ralph Nelson Elliott and others. The question always is where a cultural form is, in its particular wave or cycle. In the early stages? Ascending? Peaking? At a plateau? In decline?

BOTTOMING OUT? Which is where I place American literature at the present moment.

THE LAST GREAT CULTURAL WAVE

That would have to be rock-pop music, which coalesced around various strains of roots music– blues, folk, gospel, country– in the mid-20th century, before igniting and taking off like a rocket ship on February 9th, 1964, when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

INSTANTANEITY

To better understand exactly what happened then– the quick cultural breakthrough– I’ve been reading several books on the period. Among them, Revolution In the Head by Ian MacDonald, which analyzes Beatles records and their impact. One term MacDonald uses caught my attention: instantaneity. He described it as “an elusive maelstrom of fragmentary impressions, perceptions, and jokes reflecting the collage spirit of an instantaneous, simultaneous, chance-embracing new age.”

But, he adds: “Not that The Beatles were fans of formlessness; quite the opposite.”

Structured chaos? A controlled cultural nuclear explosion? The term, anyway, gives us much to think about as we attempt to leap ahead of the literary pack with new artistic ideas.

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Has Literature Failed the American People?

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WHY THE LITERARY GAME NEEDS TO CHANGE

ONE OF THE MOST consequential elections in American history took place on November 5th, 2024 and literature absented itself. The newly elected President is already making threats against Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and Greenland, and literature has absented itself. Unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few individuals; the rise of super-plutocrats like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Perhaps the dawn of the end of the American republic as we know it. Plans to deport twenty million people; threats to cut benefits to veterans and the poor; Elon Musk prepared to grab control of the executive branch and its agencies while making Congress and the Supreme Court puppets or redundant– but established literature, its authors and commentators are nowhere to be found. They’re writing interior monologues, or descriptions of trips to Tuscany, or giving prim readings in New York City at KGB. The country’s about to collapse, the world’s in turmoil, but our privileged literati in their isolated bubble are safe. Or mindlessly complacent.

WHERE ARE GREAT POPULIST NOVELS?

Meaning: novels which can stir the masses and the mandarins as novels once did– as Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Frank Norris (The Octopus) did in reaction to money-grabbing robber barons and monopolists in their day, the early 20th Century– causing President Theodore Roosevelt to act. To move against greedy plutocrats, John D. Rockefeller and his like, who in comparison to today’s ruthless mega-billionaire robber barons were mere shopkeepers.

WHERE ARE THE CRITICS?

Where are the art’s navigators assigned to plot course and steer the ship of literature?

Are they penning unreadable conglomerations of words discussing an art viewed through layers of other people’s musings? Or reviewing irrelevant solipsistic books pushed out by the “literary” arm of the Big Five? While tragedies of the world take place around them, and the floor of their own society begins to sink under their feet?

They seem to think they’re still in the higher reaches of the academy, writing to impress faculty advisors.

The literary art? Does it live, reaching an engaged public? Or is it buried beneath an avalanche of blather?

It’ll have to be dug out with shovels, or by giant mechanical earthmovers.

Time to rescue it.

-Karl Wenclas

All About “The Loud Boys”

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NOW AVAILABLE at both Amazon’s Kindle Store and at Kobo—

–the new hyper-pop multidimensional novella, The Loud Boys.

Cast of Characters:

VAN HECKLER

Dark web podcaster and volatile leader of the most notorious gang of right-wing extremists ever seen.

DARA DEFIANT

Beautiful-but-inscrutable news reporter and Substack writer carrying a dark secret.

ABIGAIL SHRUB

In-your-face woke attack dog.

FAKE FACE

The city’s richest and most renowned business speculator doubling as a mobster.

JEREMY SMITH

Flamboyant #2 Loud Boy.

RASHEEN HOLLERAN

Manager of a homeless shelter in The Forgotten Zone.

TERRY THE HOOD

Ambitious hired killer.

HOWELL

New publisher of a failing newspaper.

THE THREE HERMITS

A rap group.

MUGGS

The most dangerous Loud Boy.

***

HOW will these personalities clash and conflict in the most beaten-down American city of them all?

FIND OUT!

The Loud Boys. Dystopia now. This isn’t fantasy– it’s today’s reality.

The Inside Game of AI

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WHILE BOTH the literary establishment and the broader lit-mag world dawdle, tech bros are investing large sums of money toward the goal of taking over the publishing world– as outlined in THIS hair-raising article about a company called Inkitt. The article doesn’t give the entire story: that the chief Venture Capitalist backing the project, billionaire Vinod Khosla, co-founded Sun Microsystems decades ago and went on to invest in, and make a fortune from, several enormous tech projects since. Now he’s looking for new territory to conquer. His current target: the literary world.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

What’s happening is an ongoing accelerationist blitzkrieg, fueled by billions in VC money. The goal: to take over industry after industry, using the tool of AI. “Move fast and break things” has long been the tech mantra– to spread the use of new technology as quickly as possible, allowing momentum itself to bypass slow-moving regulations and protests. To make adoption of the technology an accomplished fact.

MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE

A large advantage tech companies have over traditional publishers– not to mention over low-rent literary outfits like New Pop Lit— is a tech media infrastructure in place ready to make PR noise about everything done by technology companies, large and small. This particular story about Inkitt, for instance, was covered not just by Tech Crunch, but also by dozens of other tech media outlets– coverage a standard small press outlet would never receive. In addition, business media flagships like Fortune Magazine are now devoting a huge amount of time and space to everything AI related, and are in business arrangements with AI companies, pumping onto social media outlets, like X, ads disguised as news articles.

How do poorly-funded literary outfits compete? We need to find ways to compete.

PRODUCER-DRIVEN ART

The goal, as outlined with the Inkitt strategy, is to model the literary business on what happened to the music industry, where creators aren’t artists themselves, but producers, who use computer technology to create the superstructure of a song, with an artist’s voice one of several tools layered into the recording. (With AI, a real human voice will no longer be required.) This process is well described by John Seabrook in his book, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. The key figures in Seabrook’s narrative are two producers who created the careers of pop stars Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and many others: Dr. Luke and Swedish-born Max Martin. They set a pattern that was followed by other entrepreneurs– and taken to extremes by South Korean Lee Soo-man’s SM Entertainment Company, creator of enormously successful K-Pop music. According to the Wall Street Journal, SM spends $3 million on meticulously training and molding each manufactured pop idol. The singers play their parts, but the music and presentation are the carefully-choreographed products of a billion-dollar entertainment company which calls all the shots.

This is a far cry from a Bob Dylan writing his own songs, then performing them himself with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.

Is this the future of the writer? To provide a name, face and semblance of a novel– then the tech corporation does everything else? A world of difference from the DIY ethos of print zines, and of the Underground Literary Alliance, which in the early 2000’s constructed the foundations of a cooperative literary movement in which writers themselves would make all decisions and be in total control of their own art; of every aspect of the publishing and promotional process.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

IF outfits like Inkitt are successful, one can expect that Big Five publishing will either mimic the strategy of new AI publishers, or buy them out. Then there are “self-publishing” (vanity press) outfits like Mindstir Media. Mindstir, whose packages for would-be authors with money to burn range from $3299 to $30,000, already uses AI voices for their customers’ audio books. Will they also begin using AI for the editing/creation of the books themselves, in order to inexpensively grab more customers?

In any case, the market will be swamped by more and more AI-generated books, with plots and characters following the dictates of algorithms. Computer-programmed literature for a computer-programmed world, human beings used as both tools and consumers, a handful of giant corporations run by mega-billionaires making all profits.

Alternatives need to be found for this nightmare scenario. We believe the only viable alternative for human creators to follow will be human-centered– drawing on our human souls and natural abilities to create literary works more relevant and meaningful than anything produced by inhuman bots and soulless conglomerates.

-Karl Wenclas

“The Coming AI Assault”

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–is already here. In September of last year I presented a fairly detailed analysis of how AI chatbots were beginning to affect the world of literature, in an article at the Lit Mag News Substack, here. Since then, the amount of money behind AI, and the number of tech companies and tech hustlers seeking to grab control of publishing– and thereby define literature with their twisted creations– have increased. The hustlers are moving quickly– they have to, because of the money behind them, which needs to be justified.

I’ll be discussing this more in a series of upcoming posts at this blog– revived and utilized because of the speed at which events are moving. Stay tuned to this pop-lit station.

-KW