The Promised End by Ron Singer

A Review by New Pop Lit

I had trailed him for two blocks now, long enough to decide that theft was the better option. Why? He looked like a guy who wanted his old, good jacket more than money he didn’t need.

There are two kinds of short stories.

One is the kind of story written to impress a creative writing instructor, full of wordy flourishes of what I call sentence fetish, with the story itself a secondary consideration. As often as not there is no story, only the flourishes.

The other kind is a story– a tale to be told– related in the simplest but most interesting way possible. These stories are written not for professors or critics but for readers.

THE PROMISED END by Ron Singer is the second kind. A collection of twenty tales, perfect for picking up at the end of a stressful day (there’ve been many stressful days), after dinner, after you’ve fed the cat and want to relax. When you’re ready to escape into intelligent stimulation. To lose yourself in the comfortable pleasures of well-constructed narrative.

A few of the locations in the collection are exotic. All of the stories carry the personality of the narrator, a genial New Yorker. Like a good television series, not every one of the entries is classic– but several are, with the others never less than absorbing.

Two of the stories are masterful.

“A Nose for a Jacket” is about a man considering stealing a rare jacket. Is he out-thinking himself? Tension mounts as he considers precisely how to make the grab, the challenges and possible consequences. It’s an examination into the mind of every one of us. By the end the character– and ourselves– are wiser. What happens next? This is always the essence of fiction writing.

***

In addition to the two addresses, the box bore the frightening official stamp of the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, which is the principal arm of the country’s elaborate security apparatus, sometimes referred to as “the deep state”. The box had been opened and re-taped shut. This stamped and re-sealed box spelled potential disaster.

“The Key” is the longest and best story in the volume– on the surface a simple story with a simple complication involving a couple returning from vacation in Turkey and realizing they didn’t return their hotel key. They soon discover that in another country– and in their own– nothing is ever simple.

Entertainment and wisdom? For the avid reader, The Promised End provides exactly that.

(The book also has a striking cover containing an artwork by Elizabeth Yamin.)

Purchase The Promised End here.

*******

(Photo of Ron Singer)

This Hasn’t Been A Very Magical Journey So Far by Homeless

Reviewed by New Pop Lit

“I move through the world like it’s some sort of mirage. I move through the poetry the same way someone moves through a ghost they don’t see but is still there. And it really is there, the poetry. Poetry is everywhere because life is everywhere. But how can you write about life when you’ve completely fallen out of love with life? You move through the world, or your perception of the world, like some kind of lethargic tumbleweed.”
****

Everything in the established literary world is geared toward standard status quo opinion. Everything among the literary cognoscenti is geared toward their peers, the herd of acceptable thought. NOT toward those writing outside the margins of approval or disapproval of the Big Five-financed literary establishment. Which are the only margins that matter. If you’re announcing your love of the marginalized at swanky dinners in Manhattan, at hyper-expensive chi-chi restaurants on Wall Street– Big Five-published marginalized– then how marginalized are they?

One writer who’s not on Wall Street but is marginalized and has named himself Homeless has written a novel published by an indy outfit named Expat Press.

The novel: THIS HASN’T BEEN A VERY MAGICAL JOURNEY SO FAR

I suspect Homeless is one of those homeless or near-homeless people you see throughout the island of Manhattan– that hyper-expensive island hyper-blind to its own authentic artists and writers– one of the characters handing out flyers to tourists in Times Square trying to survive to keep their art alive in that insular island dreams and disasters. . . .

His novel “Journey” has the vibe of homelessness, though it reads like a surrealistic dream, one of those dreams we all have which seem starkly real yet also mad and last forever, for days, then you wake up and you’ve been asleep for two hours. An experiment in reality and time.

The plot? There’s not much of a plot. Only a tale that begins in a hospital when the lead character meets a talking cat–

Hank Williams knows cats don’t speak. He knows they only purr or meow or sometimes screech and howl depending on their mood. But something about this unnatural act of the cat greeting him seems very natural, like it’s supposed to be happening, this unusual verbal exchange between human and feline.

–and they go on a long highway which might be a real highway or could be a highway of the mind. A mix of reality and unreality.

Isabel stops cupping her breasts and looks up around the ceiling, her face expressing intense levels of anxiety.

“I feel like an angel is locked onto my head with a sniper rifle. Like an angel’s lying on a cloud somewhere above me, staring down his scope at my head with his finger resting lightly on the trigger, ready to blow my brains out the back of my head and all over the wall.”

The narrative has the poignancy of a dream.

Expat Press is publishing more than a score of striking new writers. Fascinating, confident, intelligently imaginative writers. I see announcements about them everyplace. Their work isn’t pop and it’s not literary– it’s something underground that you’ll have to read for yourself to decide if it’s your thing. They might be, like Homeless, from the streets, or they might be instead the refuse of the academy. Or something in between. Are they the future– a possible path or magical journey showing the literary future?

That’s not for us but for you the reader to decide. They’re here and aren’t going away.
****

Purchase his book here. Do it.

(Photo of Homeless.)