The Marble Corridor

Ryan Madej is an increasingly rarefied beast (or talent, I prefer beast but options). To call his work experimental or surreal feels crude. However much it resists classification, Madej’s artistic search is the unmistakably authentic offspring (or product) of a writer’s writer in the most romantic sense of the word. A mad psycho-alchemist, a synthesist of theory, dialogue, imagination, poetry, puzzles, ciphers, maps, his work is the most decisive answer to the vacuum left behind by Cortazar, the magical realists, Calvino, the inventive purveyors of literary adventurism promising to push through every boundary to obliterate and illuminate the nature of the book. Madej is the new standard bearer, the metaphysical captain steering the panpsychic vessel. The Marble Corridor reads like found artifact, his stewardship of the style single-handedly renewing the dimension of mutual engagement, of invitation to discovery, of sobering totality of a narrative experience and surrender to its consumed delirium. Madej is in a lane all his own. Here he has fashioned a head-spinning, fifth wall shattering cavort through a labyrinth of studied introspection. Madej toys with the esoteric, the arcane, a hybrid of metamemoir and post narrative, a dynamic fulfillment of the indelible refrain that everything is happening, has happened and all that’s left is to interpret it. Madej radically reinvents the foregrounded conceit, his sensuous and disarmingly direct language a master class in forgetting oneself within an author’s intimate universe, their best kept secret wherein interpersonal boundaries erode and the reader achieves the loftiest bliss, that of unknowing, unlearning, forgetting that they are reading. - Manuel Marrero, author of Not Yet and Thousands of Lies