REVIEWS

"Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson's eerie and enigmatic debut, 'Mira Corpora.' The prose works like the expressionless masks worn by killers in horror films—the violence and lunacy that mark Jeff's coming of age are all the more frightening because of the blank face he turns toward them." --Sam Sacks, WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Episodic yet suspenseful, smeared with gutter detritus yet glittering with right-on apercus, the novel delivers both jolts to the spine and food for thought. In the reading, the book often feels like fun. Indeed, all half-dozen episodes, though they never fail to generate that speed and prickle we call suspense, take time for moments of comedy and lovely turns of thought." --John Domini, BOOKFORUM 

"There are few coming-of-age-esque novels that don’t make me feel like I’m being lied to, manipulated into caring to the point where I can’t care at all. 'Mira Corpora' is one of those few. It subverts itself and what it came from so many times that by the end you feel like it could have existed no other way." -- Blake Butler, VICE 

"Mira Corpora is an astonishing piece of work: the rare experimental novel that also features rocket pacing, the coming-of-age story riding in the wake of a million others that still feels fresh, the story that wears its shock and awe on its sleeve yet still manages to stun. It will amply satisfy readers looking for both depth and entertainment. 9.9 out of 10" -- CHICAGO CENTER FOR LITERATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

TIME OUT CHICAGO picks Mira Corpora as "One of the Best Books of Fall 2013" 

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY picks Mira Corpora as one of "The Big Indie Books of Fall 2013" 

FLAVORWIRE picks Mira Corpora as "Essential Punk Rock Literature" along with titles by William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Lydia Lunch, Justin Taylor, and Aaron Cometbus.
 
"A beautiful and intense book, a grimy fever dream in the shape of the fictional autobiography. There is a mesmerizing episode involving a society of runaway children led by a teenage oracle, a cassette tape that might or might not call to mind certain elements of Infinite Jest, and a take-no-prisoners writing style that made me read the entire book in one sitting." -- Andrew Ervin, TIN HOUSE

"You haven't read anything quite like Mira Corpora, the debut novel by Jeff Jackson. It is entirely, precisely itself, as the best art is. I finished the last chapter in a tub long gone cold because I couldn't stop reading, and it felt right to reach the last page naked and pruned and shivering. A swift little miracle of a book." -- Cari Luna, PORTLAND MERCURY 

"A mini-masterpiece that is as surreal and suspenseful as any fiction I have read... lovely and satisfying. Reading Mira Corpora, I was able to imagine a world where experimental fiction need not be written for only one small audience but a larger, more diverse one—a world where avant-garde literature can be exciting and dangerous and challenging, but not impossible." -- Benjamin Rybeck, DESTROYER MAGAZINE

"It reads like an incantation—more like a hex—and to put it down is to break the spell. It’s a séance of a novel with a pace evened as though Jackson took a rolling pin to its telling. Taken as a whole it sweats with sensual profanity and black magic. It’s also surprisingly funny, though you may not get the joke until you’ve read a few pages past it... The way that William Gass has said that The Tunnel isn’t a book, Mira Corpora more resembles the experience of holding a shell to your ear to hear the growing pains of brewing adulthood than curling up with a paperback. Mr. Jackson, please take your seat in the rickety tree house among the Grace Krilanoviches, the Ben Marcuses, the Blake Butlers, the Amelia Grays, and the Lara Glenums." -- Patrick Benjamin, TROP

"A masterfully written debut, an often brutal coming of age tale as unsettling as it is brilliant." - LARGEHEARTED BOY

"Jeff Jackson’s mesmerizing debut reads like some cross between Bruno Schulz and the backstories of random characters from Penelope Spheeris’ 1984 film Suburbia." --Jason Diamond, FLAVORWIRE

“A gutter punk Catcher in the Rye. One can glimpse the beautiful agitation universal to the coming-of-age experience: tenuous, gullible eagerness; bracing determination; fumbling assertions of independence against cravings for belonging. Mira Corpora develops with the kind of halting detours that instill within our formative years--no matter how devastating and unusual--an invaluable education, to be remembered our whole lives.” -- SHELF AWARENESS

“From feral-child-infested woods to cities wrought with decay, Jackson’s descriptions are alarmingly horrific and yet beautiful. It’s refreshing to see an author craft a novel according to his own vision, and it’s reassuring that there are presses out there who trust their readers’ intelligence enough to publish books like Mira Corpora.” -- THE RUMPUS

"A coming-of-age tale for those who came to age with David Lynch." -- WRITERS NO ONE READS

"These 15 Book Need You" - HTMLGIANT
Video review by Christopher Higgs. NBA and Kobe Bryant fans especially will want to take note. 
 
"Through an often sordid and savage phantasmagoria, Jackson, also a playwright blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, creating an unsettling allegory of growth into adulthood." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 

"The AHA Moment!" - POETS & WRITERS
Preview of Mira Corpora and discussion of the pitch letter that landed me an agent. July/Aug 2013 issue.