Category Archives: Nervosities

Michael Martone is a literary giant whose brilliant, exemplary, ingenious, absolutely singular writing is inspiring, to say the least, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Michael’s advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:

“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 of over twenty-five books, including Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Cataract 3 (1967))

Kurt Baumeister is among this infernal nation’s finest prose stylists and satirists, so you can imagine my immense delight to receive this advance praise from him today for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:

“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.” —Kurt Baumeister, author of Twilight of the Gods and Pax Americana

Garielle Lutz’s ingenious fiction is a masterclass in how to torque, sculpt, and swerve sentences and paragraphs into something engagingly strange and marvelous, something somewhere pleasurably elsewhere. So you can imagine my immense delight to receive this advance praise from her today for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:

 “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.”—Garielle Lutz, author of Stories In the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Divorcer, and Worsted

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis, 1964)

Thanks, Yrik-Max Valentonis, for this advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press):

“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?”—Yrik-Max Valentonis, author of iDEAL, 120 Days of Gomorrah, and Cranium Theatre

(Message me for a review copy, etc.)

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Gala, 1974)