Timely, sharp, lyrical, Nervosities artfully chronicles the disorder of things, the overwhelm of now, of better and worse worlds to come. Read more about the book below!
It’s received advance praise from some of the world’s finest writers: Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, Sam Lipsyte, Michael Martone, Lance Olsen, Kurt Baumeister, and Max Yrik Valentonis. Read the blurbs below!
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Publication Date: May 15, 2024
Paperback: 206 pages | 5 x 8 in. | $19.95 |
ISBN: 979-8-9865479-3-0
E-book: $5.95 | Distributed by Ingram
Timely, sharp, lyrical, Nervosities artfully chronicles the disorder of things, the overwhelm of now, of better and worse worlds to come.
In Nervosities, John Madera gives us the hyper-real through the bodies and minds of immigrants, refugees, gig workers, melancholics, underdogs, and over-thinkers. A debut collection of experimental short fiction, Nervosities explores the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, revealing the heterogeneities and instabilities that distinguish the post-industrial world. Born of exile and diaspora, grief and future-shock, the stories in Nervosities exhibit narrative modes and voices that disrupt our ever-devolving culture of violence, mediatization, and fragmentation.
Praise for Nervosities
“A spirited shake-up of language and expectations, Nervosities nails our unmoored reality with humor, attentiveness, and a bountiful imagination.”
“John Madera’s variety-pack of fictions displays a stunning range of modes, registers, rhythms, and acoustical flourishes. But these excursions into the wilds of sound and image aren’t undertaken for the sake of virtuosity alone. They are each of them honest and passionate quests for reality, for life on the page.”
“A first book? Really? It’s almost impossible to believe, considering how astonishing Nervosities is. What I love about these stories is how they couple a commitment to language and maximalist literary endeavor with a sensibility that is politically aware, engaged, and radical. From razor-sharp approaches to immigration to explorations of the vagaries and struggles of relationships, these are virtuoso pieces that are, nevertheless, decisively human. Like John Keene’s Counternarratives, Nervosities is a complex and compelling book.”
“A total-immersion catastrophe theme park comprising fierce cosmopolitan intelligence, heterodox sentences, and deranged forms, John Madera’s Nervosities evinces a beautiful rage before our whirled world in which there is always a bomb secreted a couple feet away, the timer ticking down. Listen: a rare new fiery presence has just landed in the literary jungle.”
“Borges asks us to imagine maps more detailed than the things they represent. John Madera, mad Mercator that he is, gives us, in the gyrating GPS that is Nervosities, a whole atlas of super-saturated jazzed and jazzy tympanically tsk-tsking texts. Verving veneers, swerving stories like laminated anatomies that peal and peel, fox and flex their way through the advanced math of the Four-Color Theorem. These fictions zoom. They scale and scald, flay and flux. Walls of words, they do tip-top topo cartography of every thing’s everything…and more.”
—Michael Martone, author over twenty-five books, most recently Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
“The fourteen sententially ambitious and masterly entries in Nervosities introduce us to a bold and startling new force in American fiction. John Madera is a learned and scathingly observant chronicler of our turmoil, and his prose is some of the most robust, ruckussing, and gravely brilliant I have read in ages.”
“In a literary landscape in which originality is often spoken of but seldom truly delivered, John Madera is the exception—an uncompromising writer and thinker whose singular vision is, indeed, his North Star. Linguistically rich, formally challenging, and intellectually intoxicating, Nervosities reads like the work of a mad genius torn between saving the world of letters and watching it burn.”
“Mining the zeitgeist, John Madera’s Nervosities deeply explores characters on the periphery of recent and sometimes catastrophic historic events. Here sentential torrents attack conventional narrative form, riffing on themes, placing well-chosen details, like a commanding jazz solo. Like the characters in Nervosities—each one trapped in a kind of mental Hall of Mirrors—readers of this book will be compelled to ask themselves, Who am I and why am I here?”
“Madera is faithful to his characters. Their stories begin in the middle, and stop before the end. In such an unreal world, how could there be a resolution. The narrators go on expecting change, while we the readers know that no change is possible. At one point he asks: ‘how can magic be possible in a disenchanted world?” These stories, rich, allusive, frustrating, and engaging, are the answer.”
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 