The Marble Corridor

The Marble Corridor is the middle book of Ryan Madej's Midtown Tetralogy, a four-novel cycle set in a decaying urban-shadow city called Midtown. The other three appeared from VoidFront Press and Orbis Tertius Press; this one came to JEF.

Manuel Marrero, calling the novel a found artifact, placed Madej in the Argentine magical-realist line that runs through Cortazar and Calvino, and both readings are exact: the prose is esoteric and recursive, closer to that tradition than to anything else on the JEF list, and the cycle's repeated stage of Midtown lets Madej work the territory the way Borges worked Tlon.

What the middle book does that the tetralogy needs is hold the cycle's center steady. Midtown is most fully itself here, neither the entry nor the exit but the long held middle, where the recursive logic stops feeling like a device and starts feeling like a place a reader can recognize the streets of.