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I’ve long been inspired by Brian Evenson’s inimitable writing, which transgresses the frictive limits of language and knowledge, writing as visceral as it is cerebral, is as inspiring as it is formidable, so you can imagine my delight to receive the following advance praise for Nervosities from him:

“A first book? Really? It’s almost impossible to believe, considering how astonishing Nervosities is. What I love about these stories is how they couple a commitment to language and maximalist literary endeavor with a sensibility that is politically aware, engaged, and radical. From razor-sharp approaches to immigration to explorations of the vagaries and struggles of relationships, these are virtuoso pieces which are, nevertheless, decisively human. Like John Keene’s Counternarratives, Nervosities is a complex and compelling book.” —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, and many other books

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Pause, 1964)

Big thanks to Garielle Lutz for publishing “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan” in Hobart today! A tragedy sends this fiction’s narrator into a spiral of intrinsic and extrinsic doubt, of identity, of his very sense of reality, all further “stranged” by his use of scare quotes and more besides.

Big thanks to Paul Kincaid for reviewing Nervosities, my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions!

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Madera is faithful to his characters. Their stories begin in the middle, and stop before the end. In such an unreal world, how could there be a resolution. The narrators go on expecting change, while we the readers know that no change is possible. At one point he asks: “how can magic be possible in a disenchanted world?” These stories, rich, allusive, frustrating and engaging, are the answer.

(Message me for a review copy, etc.)

I’ve long reveled in Lance Olsen’s brilliant, unruly, and otherwise disruptive writing, writing as writhing, writing as rupture, as a breaking of the so-called order of things, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Lance’s advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:

“A total-immersion catastrophe theme park comprised of fierce cosmopolitan intelligence, heterodox sentences, and deranged forms, John Madera’s Nervosities evinces a beautiful rage before our whirled world in which there is always a bomb secreted a couple feet away, the timer ticking down. Listen: a rare new fiery presence has just landed in the literary jungle.”

—Lance Olsen, author of Skin Elegies, Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie, and many other books

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis, 1964)