JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

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.)

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)

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)

Michael Martone is a literary giant whose brilliant, exemplary, ingenious, absolutely singular writing is inspiring, to say the least, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Michael’s advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:

“Borges asks us to imagine maps more detailed than the things they represent. John Madera, mad Mercator that he is, gives us, in the gyrating GPS that is Nervosities, a whole atlas of super-saturated jazzed and jazzy tympanically tsk-tsking texts. Verving veneers, swerving stories like laminated anatomies that peal and peel, fox and flex their way through the advanced math of the Four-Color Theorem. These fictions zoom. They scale and scald, flay and flux. Walls of words, they do tip-top topo cartography of every thing’s everything…and more.” —Michael Martone, author of over twenty-five books, including Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

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