JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

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!

Big thanks to Chris Vaughan for reviewing Nervosities, my debut collection of short fiction!

Vaughan writes:

In John Madera’s debut fiction collection, heavy concepts—diaspora, transversalism, the over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized world Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man could only have dreamed about—are woven by Madera into human stories with such subtle, virtuoso touches, that Nervosities becomes much more than an objet conceptual. [….] [A]nd the great joy of reading John Madera’s Nervosities is getting lost, loath to find yourself again on dull familiar ground.

Read the rest of the review HERE!

Big thanks to Wendy J. Fox for reviewing Nervosities in her excellent column at Electric Literature! She writes: “Nervosities explores the boundaries of the short story in a way that nods to intellectualism but cares more about the heart. Unique and surprising.”

Read the rest of the review HERE!

Big thanks to Daniel Green for reviewing Nervosities, my debut collection of short fiction!

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

More controlled than Bernhard’s headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera’s style isn’t simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn’t serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for “good writing.” Language in most of these stories doesn’t serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera’s stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative. [….] There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don’t make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera’s kinetically alert language. [….] Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera’s stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.

Read the rest of Green’s review HERE!