JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

I have a story in Opium Magazine: The Mania Issue. Thanks to Alec Neidenthal and Todd Zuniga!

Here’s the info:
“Let’s do a fan-fiction issue.” That sentence–said by me, I think (maybe)–is what kicked off Opium9 nine months ago, when it was still an unformed idea flitting around the 550 terabytes of storage in our aging skulls. The editorial would’ve been a breeze, but trying to design an issue around fan fic? That proved much gustier on the gale meter. So we went to the root of fan fiction, of fandom: mania.

And that’s just plain fun to consider, when you think about it (which we did, obsessively, of course). Truth is, we were going to obsess over Opium9 anyway, the way we obsess over Everything Opium: every pleasant bend and tailored bewilderment of the stories in our print issues, the perfect pairings for the Literary Death Match lineups, the perfect YouTube pitch for Opium’s iPhone app (Quick Fix with ‘Jiggle Technology’ that will debut in late November). But the better part for us: the way that obsession, delirium and dementia rose from the stories we considered for this issue. Our in-house mantra is that we design towards a theme, but let the stories stand wherever they will. While Shya Scanlon’s curatorship of our fan-fiction section is a direct breach of our editorial echo, it was on purpose. But add up John Madera’s ‘How to Be Happy and Free,’ B.R Smith’s ‘Visitation,’ and a handful of others, and it’s inescapable: we couldn’t resist mania’s charms these last months. As you’ll see.

Mania, there’s really nothing quite like it!

Featuring…

Cover!
‘The Idea Man’ by Sean Landers

Stories!
‘Walking the Walk’ by Jonathan Baumbach, ‘Cheaters’ by Dawn Raffel, ‘Entrances with Hummingbird’ by Anne Ray, ‘A Man on the Inside’ by Aaron Garretson, ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ directed by Davin Malasarn, ‘Visitation’ B.R. Smith, ‘What’s This Life For?’ Melinda Hill, ‘How to Be Happy and Free’ by John Madera, ‘Ambition Towards Love’ by Catherine Sharpe, ‘Equity’ by Wendy Duren, and ‘High Life’ by Jamie Iredell

Fan-Fiction Explosion, curated by Shya Scanlon!
Ryan Boudinot, Ben Greenman, B.K. Evenson, Sean Carman, Nick Bredie, Matt Briggs, E. Loic Leuschner, Blake Butler, Matthew Simmons, and Lindsay Mound

250-word Bookmark Contest Finalists (Judged by Andrew Sean Greer)!

Je Banach, F.J. Bergmann, Kyle Davis, Lydia Fitzpatrick, Clark Hays, Kevin Leahy, Lisa A. Levy, Aimee Mepham, Sean Murphy, Brett Rosenblatt.

Poetry!
Dean Young, Erin Berkowitz, Kathleen Rooney, and Elisa Gabbert

Cartoons!
CM Evans, Graham Roumieu, Jessy Randall, and Ben Towle

Plus, an interview with Jonathon Keats!

My  essay “Call Me Fish-Owl: Reflecting on the Novella’s neither Fish nor Fowl Status” and the compendium “Those Little Monsters: Recommended Novellas” opened up a dialogue about the novella and about great fiction in general. Since the original post I invited a few other writers, editors, and publishers (Gary Amdahl, Andrew Borgstrom, John Domini, Conor Madigan, Kyle Minor, Ander Monson, Greg Gerke, Paul Kincaid, Deb Olin Unferth, Derek White, Dan Wickett, Andrew Zornoza, to weigh in with their own lists and comments. It’s resulted in new thoughts about some of the usual suspects, but also about many other books that made never made it on the original list.

In an email to me, Andrew Zornoza wrote a wonderful meditation on the novella:

The pleasure I get out of a short story arrives in that moment when the book is put down. The world changed ever so slightly, the mind spinning lazily like a bicycle tire before a thunderstorm (if one pictures, like I do, an abandoned bicycle propped up on a cinder block, the seat leaning against an old farmhouse). With a novel, the pleasure is in the entering not the exit. It is that moment of someone lifting you up and swinging you across a chasm—prolonged. It is a universe entire, apart from our own. The novella has neither, or both, of these characteristics. Its strength lies in anomaly.

The novella is the freest of forms because it chooses itself. An author does not set out to write a novella. The story says: I will end here, I am this way, now go find a publisher. . . .

Why? The short story confronts the end before it even begins: within a handful of pages it must gather its weight and then fall of its own accord into the spooling reel of the reader’s memory. The novelist flings any promise of an ending far into the future and it’s not until a certain body count—a certain mass—has been reached that the conclusion can be seen (though occasionally, like Christopher Priest’s towed city in “Inverted World,” the words are just hauled further and further toward a continually receding horizon—see Proust, Pynchon, Bolaño’s 2666, and other rectangular doorstops containing infinities). The novella unfolds past the point at which we can absorb in one sitting, but neither does it devour territory and clamor to live upon a nightstand. And the latter to me is the biggest distinction. A novella is a tattered manuscript; it is not born with the idea of being put between two pieces of heavy card-stock and plastered with photographs, advance praise, the author’s name and a twelve digit number from the Library of Congress. Neither its size nor brevity appeal to the publishing world; it answers to nothing but the fickle cult of the devoted reader. Perhaps that is why so many of those below [hyperlink to his list] are sadly difficult to acquire.

I crossed some genre lines with this list. But here I side with Christopher Higgs and define the novella as simply “a short book.” Length is not an arbitrary distinction, what we think of as fiction, philosophy, non-fiction, manifesto is so. . . .

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Accountant, by Ethan Canin
Lee Klein

Adopted Town, by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Tobias Carroll

Adultery, by Andre Dubus
Kyle Minor

African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou
John Domini

Agape Agape, by William Gaddis
Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Adam Robinson

The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley
John Madera, Kyle Minor

The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
Josh Maday, John Madera, John Dermot Woods

The Albanian Virgin, by Alice Munro
Gregory Gerke

The Albertine Notes, by Rick Moody
John Domini

All Through the House, by Christopher Coake
Kyle Minor

Among Women Only, by Cesare Pavese
Andrew Zornoza

Amras, by Thomas Bernhard
Carole Maso

Angels and Insects, by A.S. Byatt
Lorette C. Luzajic

Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Amelia Gray

Anjou Flying Streamers After, by Carole Maso
John Domini

Another World, by J.-H. Rosny aîné
Paul Kincaid

Apt Pupil, by Stephen King
Nick Antosca, Timothy Gager

Arthur, by Matthew Savoca
Kathryn Regina

As a Friend, by Forrest Gander
Matthew Simmons

As for Me and My House, by Sinclair Ross
Lorette C. Luzajic

The Ash Gray Proclamation, by Dennis Cooper
Justin Taylor

The Aspern Papers, by Henry James
John Haskell, John Dermot Woods

At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft
Justin Taylor

The Atrocity Exhibition, by J.G. Ballard
Josh Maday

At the Bottom of the River, by Jamaica Kincaid
Reb Livingston

Aureole, by Carole Maso
Michael Joyce

Auslander, by Michelle Herman
Kyle Minor

Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson
John Madera

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Nicolle Elizabeth, Amelia Gray, William Walsh

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