Category Archives: Among the Dynamos

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

Dawn Raffel’s writing is masterfully lyrical, engagingly strange, and intensely precise, deftly limning “ordinary” life—especially family, memory, loss, and longing—into emotionally pulsing worlds where the familiar becomes uncanny and seeming minutiae throb with acute consequence; so you can imagine how delighted I am to receive Raffel’s advance praise for Among the Dynamos (BlazeVOX [books]), my forthcoming novel:

“It was a pleasure to immerse myself in Among the Dynamos, John Madera’s audacious and (darkly) funny and moving and brave novel. Cousin to Olivia Laing’s Crudo, and in seeming conversation with Frederic Tuten, one of the most intellectually robust and inventive writers of our time, who retains a powerful emotional center—I’d say there are echoes of many of Don DeLillo’s themes, e.g., politics, alienation, despair, and desire. But also race and sex. I especially admire the audacity of a post-Trump book, Madera making desire, believably, the strongest valence. The writing is startling and original. Time and again, I found myself stopping to highlight an arresting line or passage. Some strands have the feeling of a spiraling Greek chorus: the social media posts, the pitch-perfect overheard conversations, the musical interludes, even the news. ‘To pay attention is to seethe, to mourn,’ Madera writes, and he has paid exquisite attention in these pages, Among the Dynamos indeed seething and mourning but above all living. Hats off to him!”
—Dawn Raffel, author of In the Year of Long Division, Carrying the Body, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, and Boundless as the Sky