JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Gary Amdahl’s writing is dazzlingly intelligent, mordantly funny, formally audacious, and gloriously digressive, careening through philosophical conundrums, political absurdities, and the unruly mysteries of human consciousness with an exuberance all its own, so you can imagine how delighted I am to receive Amdahl’s advance praise for Among the Dynamos (BlazeVOX [books]), my forthcoming novel:

“There is, in the early pages of John Madera’s Among the Dynamos, a reference to hypnosis and to Buber’s I and Thou. The context in the moment is ambiguous. You can really cover the waterfront with ideas of hypnosis (there is no more fertile strain of narrative in B-movies), but this novel is hypnotic in the best sense, in an ideal sense. The mind is cleared, as if by a life-saving breeze, of cant, neurosis, propaganda, and, well, the endless noise and nonsense that our psyches swim in and in which we often drown. It is the identical twin of meditation, and it allows us to commune with things as they are, with the quiet and abiding truth that underlies not just the work of the best novelists but of the imagination and thus the universe. This is the truth Among the Dynamos runs on.”
—Gary Amdahl, author of Visigoth, I Am Death, and Across My Big Brass Bed

Steven Moore writes with formidable erudition, playful invention, and a capacious imagination, transforming the history of the novel into a dazzling, irreverent, and endlessly provocative exploration of literature’s subversive possibilities; so you can imagine how delighted I am to receive Moore’s advance praise for Among the Dynamos (BlazeVOX [books]), my forthcoming novel:

“While at times I felt like I was doomscrolling through a gallery of artsy eccentrics curated by a witty, erudite content-creator, it’s the language that kept me scrolling. Not a word is wasted in this searing critique of our hot-mess society, served up in meaty prose marbled with puns, wordplay, arch adjectives and adverbs, and cultural allusions aplenty (beginning with the novel’s title). Like Nirvana’s video for ‘In Bloom,’ which the narrator loves, Among the Dynamos is ‘a masterpiece, a profound artistic statement, its satire absolutely corrosive. Hilariously self-deprecating and intelligently critical of the celebrity-industrial complex.’ At one point, the narrator wonders: ‘Maybe art is both toxin and cure, like a vaccine’; Madera’s novel is both.”
—Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History