Big thanks to Daniel Green for reviewing Nervosities, my debut collection of short fiction!
Here’s an excerpt from the review:
More controlled than Bernhard’s headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera’s style isn’t simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn’t serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for “good writing.” Language in most of these stories doesn’t serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera’s stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative. [….] There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don’t make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera’s kinetically alert language. [….] Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera’s stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.
Read the rest of Green’s review HERE!
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 