JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

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)

Big thanks to John Schertzer for reviewing Nervosities, my debut collection of short fiction!

Schertzer writes:

[Madera] foregrounds flux and becoming as intimate to experience, what he unsays throughout Nervosities demonstrating a rare compellingness that is oftimes surprising, if not astonishing. [….] Madera accomplishes this through a broad and able stylistic range. […] Madera comes across […] always as very much himself, with ample chops and an amoebic mutability to reshape himself as the needs of his vision and content of the event determine. Achieved with impressive technical skill, the stories demonstrate profound empathy for their characters, many of whom are damaged, at their wit’s end, edging toward some precipice or another. There are surges of the misunderstood, destructive or self-destructive, widowed, bereaved, homeless, unjustly imprisoned, all nomadic souls wandering and attempting to make sense of the varied disaster sites of their lives. And it is their singular modes of assessing their experience that animate these stories, each of which have own their distinctive vibrance. [….] For all of its ambiguities and uncertainties, Nervosities, which foregrounds the creative and otherwise generative possibilities of language and meaning-making, also extends a hand, and a place of recognition or a homebase, for those of us “in flight,” in the physical, mental, or spiritual sense. Finishing Nervosities, I’m left with the sense that John Madera will continually offer a helping hand, perhaps even newer and enervating “lines of flight,” to a growing number of the lost, the travelers and disenfranchised, who are both the products and victims of late capitalism even as it itself transforms in unknowable ways.    

Read the rest of the review HERE!