Big thanks to Ian S. Maloney for his incisive, insightful, and generous review of Nervosities, which was published in Compulsive Reader yesterday!
Here’s an excerpt from Maloney’s review:
The stories in John Madera’s Nervosities take readers on a journey of dislocation, to explore narrative consciousness and the richness of fictional fragmentation. [….] These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning. […] Much of Nervosities seems underpinned by the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly the concept of the rhizome: namely, connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, a-signifying rupture, and openness to asymmetrical structure and reorganization. [….] Numerous times during Nervosities we see darkly comical and yet philosophically driven insights into the modern world. These narrative voices pass into and through a world of distorted mirrors and dark passages, as they move to other states of being and disassociation from an unpredictable present. Violence and menace often lurk around the corners of the stories. Madera’s prose plays beautifully with acoustics and seems often inspired by poetry. I was moved often by his use of the catalogue during the collection, something I associate with Whitman, and his narrators’ sense of irony, humor, and wit, even as they peer into the dark voids of modern life. [….] Madera’s Nervosities juxtaposes so many layers of narrative and philosophical insight and meaning—it’s certainly not for a novice or casual reader of fiction. But it is a call for intrepid literary travelers who can hear the echoes of Stein, Beckett, Eliot, Whitman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and others across these pages, to rise to its beautiful innovations, its playful use of fragmentation, to better see the chaotic yet meaningful narrative world multiplying under the surface of this rhizomatic text.
Read the rest of the review HERE!
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 