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My Review of Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair

Posted on December 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ve always wanted to have work in The Brooklyn Rail. And I’m happy to say it’s happened now. Please check out my review of Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair. An excerpt:

While certainly sharing similar themes with Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Rikki Ducornet, and Kelly Link, Howard’s style suggests Mervyn Peake, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michal Ajvaz, and Nabokov at his extreme descriptive best, as well a shared affinity for disjunction and refraction reminiscent of John Ashbery, all while gazing perspicaciously at language through the same loupe that master-jeweler Wallace Stevens used. Howard’s stories are, as one of her characters says, like “going through a maze, you can make so many turns. You may get to the center, but it would take awhile. At some point along the way, maybe you forget the center.” In short, Howard’s stories are, modifying a phrase from her book, “lovely views from harrowing ruins.”

My Review of Justin Sirois’s MLKG SCKLS

Posted on December 8, 2009 | 2 comments

My review of Justin Sirois’s MLKG SCKLS is up HERE at New Pages. An excerpt:

Sirois’s prose glistens with precision. Its sparseness mirrors the parched desert through which Salim and Khalil travel, its lyricism one proof of how resilient we can be in the face of disaster. Clocking in at fifty-five pages, this novelette manages to pack dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling, lapidary views of blood, and doses of humor (like Khalil’s tall tale about a man with a crippled hand whose life was saved by a cigarette) that spell the reader through a harrowing trip to a place that’s, with any luck, safe, or, at least safer…

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Shya Scanlon Interview

Posted on December 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Shya Scanlon interviewed me on Facebook:

Shya Scanlon: As an author, blogger and founder of Chapbook Review, you are a rare breed: someone who seems as comfortable reviewing fiction as you are writing it. Do you think authors have a responsibility to share, discuss, and promote work not their own? Do you personally feel a responsibility to do so?

John Madera: First of all, thanks for setting up this tiny interview series. Sometimes I think of Facebook as “Fakebook” so it’s great to see something that has a little more dynamism. As for all the stuff I’m up to, I feel like I’m at my best when I’m juggling all kinds of plates. They all intersect, play off of each other, and cross-pollinate.

As for responsibility, I think writers, in order to be called writers, must write. How often and how much, I wouldn’t presume to say or demand. I don’t think that a writer has a responsibility to share, discuss, and promote work that isn’t theirs. Writers who choose to work in total seclusion and isolation without a care for anyone else is fine with me; what matters is the quality of their work.

As for me, I feel it’s less a responsibility but more something that brings me great pleasure and teaches me so much.
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My Review of Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poem. A Novel.

Posted on December 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Check out my review of Jamie Iredell’s wonderful Prose. Poem. A Novel. at the Rumpus:

What I enjoyed most about Iredell’s narrative are his lyrical, almost Annie Dillard-like observations of nature, the elements, the landscape. But where Dillard’s evocations are solemn reveries sodden with all kinds of lushness, with prose akin to—[namecheck any American transcendentalist here]—Iredell’s descriptions are prickly, brittle, harboring all kinds of menace and malevolence.