JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Big thanks to superb writer Rone Shavers for interviewing me about Nervosities! Grateful for his smart, challenging, and inspiring questions, to say the least. Big thanks, too, to Rain Taxi and Eric Lorberer (its stalwart editor)  for publishing it!

Here’s an excerpt:

To make something vitally unusual requires that one be “difficult,” requires an indominable obstinacy along with total vulnerability, a knowing steadfastness in the face of great unknowing, likely misunderstanding, possible censure, ridicule, ostracization, etc.; it requires rugged determination and patience that may on the surface look like foolhardiness or intransigence in the face of so-called reality, but which is really heartful pluck, whimsical vim, and empathetic elasticity.

That said, it’s not a willful difficulty that genuinely adventurous, generously subversive writers aim for; they don’t deliberately and mean-spiritedly set up obstacles for the unsuspecting reader to overcome, the act of which strikes me as a kind of sadism. The aim—or, better to say, the process such writers live within—is one where they set up difficulties for themselves, organize challenges that compel them to go beyond their current abilities, to go beyond, moreover, what society’s planners, the disciplinarians, the authorities, the professional managers, the haters, the naysayers, etc., say is their place, which is “nowhere” in the worst senses of the word.

All to say, difficulty is a pleasure, the pleasure of getting lost, of stumbling around in the darkness of the unknown, of the impossible.

Read the rest of the interview HERE!

Big thanks to Nick Mamatas for reviewing Nervosities in the latest print issue of The Anarchist Review of Books!

Mamatas writes:
“John Madera writes in the innovative tradition (ironic)—a form like a delta […] with tributaries of experimental, transgressive, New Narrative, the poetic, postmodern, post-structuralist avant-garde[,] and avant-pop[,] the first meaning that a page might be full of periods to suggest a very long scream and explicit references to Lyotard and the last meaning explicit references to David Lynch and the relative absence of dialogue between characters in the […] attempt to create a televisual experience as we flash through circumstances and reversals of fortune.”

Delighted to receive a five-star review of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), my debut collection of fiction, from literary exemplar Seb Doubinsky today! Doubinsky writes:

“John Madera’s Nervosities is the living proof that avant-garde literature is not dead, as we watch the bloated corpse of mainstream fiction drift by in its toxic river of sameness. As a true heir to Clarice Lispector, Ann Quin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, early Don DeLillo, and a collection of crazy literary ghosts, John Madera uses language as a false center, a deterrent to lure the reader into its true center, the characters’ alienations, dreams, and epiphanies. Both vernacular and complex, the stories take place in various parts of the globe, but all are linked by the psychogeography of hope, memories, and shattered identities. A true nightmare for academics (like all the best [books]), Nervosities is a must have/must read for any reader curious for an extremely rewarding literary challenge.”
—Seb Doubinsky, author of over fifteen novels and six poetry collections

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

Delighted to have received this praise for my debut fiction collection, Nervosities, from literary giant Norman Lock today:
“John Madera’s sentences accumulate in fictions that everywhere disturb the notion of fiction itself, subverting its conventions, and challenging the reader to enter not only the universe of words presented with such liveliness on the page but also the wider and more dangerous one in which we sleep at our peril.” —Norman Lock, author of many books, including The American Novels Series

(Message me for a review copy, etc.)

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Gala, 1974)