BOOK

Timely, sharp, lyrical, Nervosities artfully chronicles the disorder of things, the overwhelm of now, of better and worse worlds to come.

In Nervosities, John Madera gives us the hyper-real through the bodies and minds of immigrants, refugees, gig workers, melancholics, underdogs, and over-thinkers. A debut collection of experimental short fiction, Nervosities explores the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, revealing the heterogeneities and instabilities that distinguish the post-industrial world. Born of exile and diaspora, grief and future-shock, the stories in Nervosities exhibit narrative modes and voices that disrupt our ever-devolving culture of violence, mediatization, and fragmentation.

Advance Praise for Nervosities:

“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, most recently Netsuke, Brightfellow, Trafik, and The Plotinus

“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 The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

“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 that 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 and many other books

“A total-immersion catastrophe theme park comprising 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 over thirty books, including My Red Heaven, Skin Elegies, and Always Crashing in the Same Car

“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 over twenty-five books, most recently Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

“John Madera’s sentences accumulate in fictions that everywhere disturb the notion of fiction itself, subverting its conventions, and challenging the reader to enter not only the universe of words presented with such liveliness on the page but also the wider and more dangerous one in which we sleep at our peril.” —Norman Lock, author of many books, including The American Novels Series

“The fourteen sententially ambitious and masterly entries in Nervosities introduce us to a bold and startling new force in American fiction. John Madera is a learned and scathingly observant chronicler of our turmoil, and his prose is some of the most robust, ruckussing, and gravely brilliant I have read in ages.” —Garielle Lutz, author of Stories In the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Divorcer, and Worsted

“In a literary landscape in which originality is often spoken of but seldom truly delivered, John Madera is the exception—an uncompromising writer and thinker whose singular vision is, indeed, his North Star. Linguistically rich, formally challenging, and intellectually intoxicating, Nervosities reads like the work of a mad genius torn between saving the world of letters and watching it burn.” —Kurt Baumeister, author of Twilight of the Gods and Pax Americana

“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

Excerpts from Reviews:

“Nervosities explores the boundaries of the short story in a way that nods to intellectualism but cares more about the heart. Unique and surprising.”
—Electric Literature

“Formally inventive and wholly absorbing, John Madera’s stories of alienation and troubled psyches aren’t always easy to summarize. Readers who enjoy a blend of the surreal and the cerebral will likely find plenty to embrace in his collection Nervosities…”
—Reactor Magazine

“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.”
—Unbeaten Paths

“The stories in John Madera’s Nervosities take readers on a journey of dislocation, to explore narrative consciousness and the richness of fictional fragmentation. [….] These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning. […] Much of Nervosities seems underpinned by the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly the concept of the rhizome: namely, connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, a-signifying rupture, and openness to asymmetrical structure and reorganization. [….] Numerous times during Nervosities we see darkly comical and yet philosophically driven insights into the modern world. These narrative voices pass into and through a world of distorted mirrors and dark passages, as they move to other states of being and disassociation from an unpredictable present. Violence and menace often lurk around the corners of the stories. Madera’s prose plays beautifully with acoustics and seems often inspired by poetry. I was moved often by his use of the catalogue during the collection, something I associate with Whitman, and his narrators’ sense of irony, humor, and wit, even as they peer into the dark voids of modern life. [….] Madera’s Nervosities juxtaposes so many layers of narrative and philosophical insight and meaning—it’s certainly not for a novice or casual reader of fiction. But it is a call for intrepid literary travelers who can hear the echoes of Stein, Beckett, Eliot, Whitman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and others across these pages, to rise to its beautiful innovations, its playful use of fragmentation, to better see the chaotic yet meaningful narrative world multiplying under the surface of this rhizomatic text.
—Compulsive Reader

“The range of themes, voices, and settings packed into this collection is wide—each piece heads into fresh territory and even those that may touch on familiar ground […] are approached from original angles. Together, the stories gathered in Nervosities offer slices of contemporary American life and culture reflected in a cracked funhouse mirror, frequently dark but always honest.”
—Rough Ghosts

“[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. [….] 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. [….] 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.”
—Heavy Feather Review

“In John Madera’s Nervosities, 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 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.”
—Volume 1 Brooklyn

“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.” —Through the Dark Labyrinth

“John Madera’s Nervosities is living proof that avant-garde literature is not dead, as we watch the bloated corpse of mainstream fiction drift by in its toxic river of sameness. As a true heir to Clarice Lispector, Ann Quin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, early Don DeLillo, and a collection of crazy literary ghosts, John Madera uses language as a false center, a deterrent to lure the reader into its true center, the characters’ alienations, dreams, and epiphanies. Both vernacular and complex, the stories take place in various parts of the globe, but all are linked by the psychogeography of hope, memories, and shattered identities. A true nightmare for academics (like all the best books), Nervosities is a must have/must read for any reader curious for an extremely rewarding literary challenge.”
—Seb Doubinsky, author of over fifteen novels and six poetry collections

“John Madera writes in the innovative tradition (ironic)—a form like a delta […] with tributaries of experimental, transgressive, New Narrative, the poetic, postmodern, post-structuralist avant-garde[,] and avant-pop[,] the first meaning that a page might be full of periods to suggest a very long scream and explicit references to Lyotard and the last meaning explicit references to David Lynch and the relative absence of dialogue between characters in the […] attempt to create a televisual experience as we flash through circumstances and reversals of fortune.”
—The Anarchist Review of Books