Thanks, Yrik-Max Valentonis, for this advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press):
“Mining the zeitgeist, John Madera’s Nervosities deeply explores characters on the periphery of recent and sometimes catastrophic historic events. Here sentential torrents attack conventional narrative form, riffing on themes, placing well-chosen details, like a commanding jazz solo. Like the characters in Nervosities—each one trapped in a kind of mental Hall of Mirrors—readers of this book will be compelled to ask themselves, Who am I and why am I here?”—Yrik-Max Valentonis, author of iDEAL, 120 Days of Gomorrah, and Cranium Theatre
Rikki Ducornet is easily one of the world’s finest writers, a paragon of the radical imagination, of vital subversion, of the wild and the marvelous. So you can imagine my extreme delight to share Ducornet’s advance praise for Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), my forthcoming collection of experimental fictions:
“A spirited shake-up of language and expectations, Nervosities nails our unmoored reality with humor, attentiveness, and a bountiful imagination.” —Rikki Ducornet, author over twenty-five books
Good news! Contrapuntos X is now available. It features “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed,” a single-sentence fiction of mine that limns the liminality, precarity, and atomization of life in/within the Capitalocene-of-the-crime. And yes, the title is from Part III of Francis Bacon’s “Plan of the Work.”
Here are editors Aimée Mendoza and Lucía Orellana’s remarks about “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed”:
A story of approximately three thousand two hundred words told without periods or paragraphs; the flow of thought of a man who, at a crucial moment in his life, gives an account of it in an accelerated tour through the recesses of his memories, his desires, his aspirations; all this interspersed with the present and acute moment and its effects on his body, his mind, his existence. John Madera offers us in “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” an intense narrative exercise, controlled and at the same time enriched with vertiginous rhythm and language.
Thanks, Lucía Orellana and Aimée Mendoza! And thanks, Marcos Pico Rentería and Ángel M. Rañales!
Delighted to share that Anti-Oedipus Press will be publishing my first book, Nervosities, a collection of experimental short fictions, in 2024. Ka-pow!
Nervosities chronicles the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, the various fragmentations resulting from and the violences occurring within and because of these heterogeneities and instabilities. Borne of diaspora and transversalism, Nervosities employs disruptive narrative modes, registers, etc., to deeply engage and interpret our over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized worlds. What is ultimately enacted in these fictions is confrontation with and destabilization of what Deleuze and Guattari via Antonin Artaud call “the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money.”
Helmed by D. Harlan Wilson (an exemplary writer in his own right), Anti-Oedipus Press has a commanding list of fantastic writers that includes Ansgar Allen, Louis Armand, Steve Aylett, Eugen Bacon, Harold Jaffe, Barry N. Malzberg, Lance Olsen, James Reich, Lawrence A. Rickels, and Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m amazed and thankful to be counted among this innovatively unruly number.
Big thanks to editors Bradford Morrow, Jason Teal, Douglas Glover, Adrian Todd Zuniga, and Elizabeth Cohen, who previously published one or more fictions from Nervosities in, respectively, Conjunctions, Heavy Feather Review, Numéro Cinq, Opium Magazine, and Saranac Review!
Big thanks, too, to several other supporters of this work, namely, Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, Carole Maso, and Lenina Nadal!
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 