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.
Through the Dark Labyrinth Reviews Nervosities!
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.)
Posted in Nervosities
Advance Praise for Nervosities from Lance Olsen!
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)
Posted in Nervosities
Advance Praise for Nervosities from Sam Lipsyte!
I’ve long reveled in Sam Lipsyte’s brilliant, acidly comic, tungsten nanoneedle-sharp writing, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Lipsyte’s advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:
“John Madera’s variety-pack of fictions displays a stunning range of modes, registers, rhythms, and acoustical flourishes. But these excursions into the wilds of sound and image aren’t undertaken for the sake of virtuosity alone. They are each of them honest and passionate quests for reality, for life on the page.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You and The Ask
(Message me for a review copy, etc.)
(Image: Bridget Riley’s Gala, 1974)
Posted in Nervosities

