JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Good news! The New York State Council on the Arts has awarded me a $10,000 grant to support my writing an epic, speculative cross-genre novel that limns the continua of exile, diaspora, fusion, limbo, and hauntology, and their interstices. The novel deeply engages the poetics of not only relation but of being and becoming, displacing conventional notions of the “self” and the “self”’s “surroundings,” that is, the external conditions and forces and histories that are always fraught, always contingent, etc.

Excelsior!

(Image: In, Between, In-between Worlds, John Madera (2016))

I’ve long been inspired by Brian Evenson’s inimitable writing, which transgresses the frictive limits of language and knowledge, writing as visceral as it is cerebral, is as inspiring as it is formidable, so you can imagine my delight to receive the following advance praise for Nervosities from him:

“A first book? Really? It’s almost impossible to believe, considering how astonishing Nervosities is. What I love about these stories is how they couple a commitment to language and maximalist literary endeavor with a sensibility that is politically aware, engaged, and radical. From razor-sharp approaches to immigration to explorations of the vagaries and struggles of relationships, these are virtuoso pieces which are, nevertheless, decisively human. Like John Keene’s Counternarratives, Nervosities is a complex and compelling book.” —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, and many other books

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Pause, 1964)

Big thanks to Garielle Lutz for publishing “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan” in Hobart today! A tragedy sends this fiction’s narrator into a spiral of intrinsic and extrinsic doubt, of identity, of his very sense of reality, all further “stranged” by his use of scare quotes and more besides.

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.)