What do you think?
Rate this book
Nevers
"Megan Martin's muscular, gleaming prose contends with how we as humans cope with the itchy banality of reality. Stuffed with imagi-nary men, future bathtub deaths, sick black jellies, meteor lettuce, and vaginas full of Jesus light, Nevers emerges from the tension between what is real, what is perceived, what is felt and what is completely imagined. What makes Martin such an amazing writer is that it's hard to discern the differences-and it doesn't even matter."
Melissa Broder, author of Scarecrone
"Nevers is that feeling you get when you are suddenly inside your-self, looking around, going, Hey, that's my coffee mug. That's my pen. I am me. It's like standing in your childhood home as the walls are replaced with snapshots of the same walls. This is a book, only it has a mouth."
Lindsay Hunter, author of Don't Kiss Me
"In Megan Martin's fantastic Nevers, we encounter the situation of a book that is conscious of itself. This seems right, because the life in its pages is conscious of itself, too-all at once, from a dozen slip-sliding angles, the whole a shimmering phantasm held aloft by an act of voice so clean and real it can squash your heart."
Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne?
"This book could breastfeed a twelve-year-old boy. This book could have an adulterous affair with an undiscovered marsupial species. This book could write online dating profiles for Wyoming's vast population of robot foxes who have been widowed by hit-and-run crimes. This book is not about the apocalypse, but it has that I-got-sick-of-my-boyfriend's-nose-hair-and-Sartre's-giving-me-cramps-and-the-only-way-I-can-think-to-stall-the-imminent-threat-of-mass-extinction-is-by-adopting-a-feral-cat-and-aren't-we-useless-and-fucked type of apocalyptic glee about it."
Tessa Mellas, author of Lungs Full of Noise
Melissa Broder, author of Scarecrone
"Nevers is that feeling you get when you are suddenly inside your-self, looking around, going, Hey, that's my coffee mug. That's my pen. I am me. It's like standing in your childhood home as the walls are replaced with snapshots of the same walls. This is a book, only it has a mouth."
Lindsay Hunter, author of Don't Kiss Me
"In Megan Martin's fantastic Nevers, we encounter the situation of a book that is conscious of itself. This seems right, because the life in its pages is conscious of itself, too-all at once, from a dozen slip-sliding angles, the whole a shimmering phantasm held aloft by an act of voice so clean and real it can squash your heart."
Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne?
"This book could breastfeed a twelve-year-old boy. This book could have an adulterous affair with an undiscovered marsupial species. This book could write online dating profiles for Wyoming's vast population of robot foxes who have been widowed by hit-and-run crimes. This book is not about the apocalypse, but it has that I-got-sick-of-my-boyfriend's-nose-hair-and-Sartre's-giving-me-cramps-and-the-only-way-I-can-think-to-stall-the-imminent-threat-of-mass-extinction-is-by-adopting-a-feral-cat-and-aren't-we-useless-and-fucked type of apocalyptic glee about it."
Tessa Mellas, author of Lungs Full of Noise
114 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
200 people want to read
About the author
Megan Martin
28 books31 followersMegan Martin is the author of a collection of tiny stories, NEVERS (Caketrain Journal and Press 2014/Dzanc Reprint 2025) and a book of prose, Sparrow & Other Eulogies (Gold Wake 2011).
Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, The Collagist, Hobart, MAKE: a Chicago Literary Magazine, >kill author, The Offending Adam, The Ampersand Review, Caketrain, Tarpaulin Sky, and WebConjunctions, among others.
She lives in Cincinnati, a place of weird, wonderful, and disappointing energies, with her boyfriend and 3 cats.
Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, The Collagist, Hobart, MAKE: a Chicago Literary Magazine, >kill author, The Offending Adam, The Ampersand Review, Caketrain, Tarpaulin Sky, and WebConjunctions, among others.
She lives in Cincinnati, a place of weird, wonderful, and disappointing energies, with her boyfriend and 3 cats.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 9, 2022
Read in 2015, edited 9/8/22, for Throwback Thursday.
A book, and an author, that deserve more attention. Nevers, by Megan Martin.
.......................
"Nevers" is a must-have collection of short fiction by Megan Martin, a startlingly original and gifted writer. Often surreal, sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, always artful, these are compact stories, most of them topping out at just one or two pages. But they are crammed with images that don't let go, and are presented with a narrative style that is unforgettable. The first person narrator makes references to Martin's real-life publisher, Caketrain, as well as Megan Martin herself (fictionally, and alternately, one guesses, semi-fictionally); and the narrator makes metafictional references also to the book itself, and even, individual pages.
On page 91, a story opens with an Easter egg of sorts, words left for an ex-boyfriend ("B", who may or may not be fictional), the subject of some of these stories:
"Page 91, this limp little piece of paper stuffed deep into this tiny nothing book, is the only place you'd ever discover that, despite her better judgment, a woman still dreams about you."
Whether or not the players and the feelings conveyed here, are "true," no matter, this is amazing prose.
As Melissa Schwenk relates in her review for Coal Hill Review,
"Ultimately, nothing about Megan Martin’s book Nevers is easy to define and that is the brilliance of the work."
https://coalhillreview.com/book-revie...
Well said. And it is difficult to know what more to add, other than suggest you let Martin's words speak for themselves. Read some of the stories from Nevers in the generous 44 page sample provided by the publisher, Caketrain, then purchase the book from Amazon or Barnes & Nobles, or directly from the publisher.
A book, and an author, that deserve more attention. Nevers, by Megan Martin.
.......................
"Nevers" is a must-have collection of short fiction by Megan Martin, a startlingly original and gifted writer. Often surreal, sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, always artful, these are compact stories, most of them topping out at just one or two pages. But they are crammed with images that don't let go, and are presented with a narrative style that is unforgettable. The first person narrator makes references to Martin's real-life publisher, Caketrain, as well as Megan Martin herself (fictionally, and alternately, one guesses, semi-fictionally); and the narrator makes metafictional references also to the book itself, and even, individual pages.
On page 91, a story opens with an Easter egg of sorts, words left for an ex-boyfriend ("B", who may or may not be fictional), the subject of some of these stories:
"Page 91, this limp little piece of paper stuffed deep into this tiny nothing book, is the only place you'd ever discover that, despite her better judgment, a woman still dreams about you."
Whether or not the players and the feelings conveyed here, are "true," no matter, this is amazing prose.
As Melissa Schwenk relates in her review for Coal Hill Review,
"Ultimately, nothing about Megan Martin’s book Nevers is easy to define and that is the brilliance of the work."
https://coalhillreview.com/book-revie...
Well said. And it is difficult to know what more to add, other than suggest you let Martin's words speak for themselves. Read some of the stories from Nevers in the generous 44 page sample provided by the publisher, Caketrain, then purchase the book from Amazon or Barnes & Nobles, or directly from the publisher.
June 3, 2014
Part fiction, part poetry, part rant, the 50-or-so short pieces in Nevers serve up great line after great line. While most do not tell a story in the traditional narrative sense, they are just-formed enough to avoid the label of prose poem. Some sort of plot is happening here even if I don't always know exactly what. Characters are sparse, just the narrator (whose biting wit and profanity-laden observations drive the whole book), an (ex)boyfriend identified only as B., and Ted, the next-door neighbor who appears a few times in caricature. I think the narrator's mother gets mentioned in there somewhere, too. The whole book ends up being a character study of the narrator herself, as each observation and each flash of frustration/anger reveals a little bit more about her. In the end, I wasn't quite sure she was someone with whom I'd want to spend time, but I did sort of like her. She was honest, and remained that way even in her moments of greatest unreliability. But mostly, the narrator is searching for something, and I think that something is the unknown something she should be searching for in the first place. A pre-search, if you will. She may not have found an answer to the big question yet, but her smaller answers are truly brilliant and often quite funny.
March 14, 2022
This book is a glass boat moving through an asphalt sea. Wildly inventive and deeply intimate, deeply insecure and wholly powerful, Nevers is always at risk of flying apart due to its centrifugal force, like a washing machine with a cinderblock in it. About three quarters in, Martin writes, "I hate when dreams are literal In real life my ex was half a man in every way. I loved him that way. I still love him that way. I barely remember the houseboat we lived on, just the river was chemical green and the walls were covered in posters of bands I didn't know." What great thing this book exists, moving from revelation to imagination, nostalgia to now. I would want to live inside of Nevers if I didn't already.
Read
June 9, 2014Nevers – Megan Martin
by Lauren Friedlander
[Caketrain; 2014]
The edges of my copy of Nevers are spiked with white sticky tabs, marking sections in which I can read every inch of my own body, lines that weave into a through-line of meta-something self-awareness, and bits that are in particular fucking cool. Megan Martin, author of Nevers, is Gary Lutz-y in that way that makes for a killer party trick: whip her new collection of fictions open to any page and pick a sentence like a spot on a globe — it will almost guaranteed-ly knock off socks. Look, I’ll do it right now . . . aaand . . . “Today was a new day: I performed tricks balanced on a red ball balanced on a grizzly bear’s back tooth balanced on a pin’s head for gold tokens.” Come on.
I should explain primarily that the reason for my white sticky tabs, a step even above that pretentious pastime of penciling-in-the-margins, is because the package of this slim thing is just astounding and insane and as I read it in my office, I have to shove its cover in the face of each hapless visitor with an exuberant, “LOOK-A-DIS COVER!” I’m trying to keep it pristine, keep it a keepsake. Caketrain routinely kills it cover-wise, and Nevers is no different. It’s cerebral Neoclassicism with this Zorro-cum-Kesha face paint (yes) raccooning two 18th-century Bonaparte sisters, holding a folded letter, a list, perhaps, of NEVERS. Never-have-I-, Never-will-I-, evers. What is on Megan Martin’s list?
Well, she somehow evokes diary entry and blog and tweet and manifesto, all wrapped up in pulsating truth, and yeesh is that exactly the worst description I could possibly give now that I re-read it. I am all a-cringe. But that is the thing with Megan Martin. I am hard-pressed to aptly describe the stun ray gun of this collection without quoting her directly, but endless bullet point quotes does not a review make, and anyway just go buy the book. After I read Nevers I went and bought all of Caketrain’s entire shit for like $60 on paypal. They are not giving me money or even a cool tote for saying so!
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/05/30/r...
by Lauren Friedlander
[Caketrain; 2014]
The edges of my copy of Nevers are spiked with white sticky tabs, marking sections in which I can read every inch of my own body, lines that weave into a through-line of meta-something self-awareness, and bits that are in particular fucking cool. Megan Martin, author of Nevers, is Gary Lutz-y in that way that makes for a killer party trick: whip her new collection of fictions open to any page and pick a sentence like a spot on a globe — it will almost guaranteed-ly knock off socks. Look, I’ll do it right now . . . aaand . . . “Today was a new day: I performed tricks balanced on a red ball balanced on a grizzly bear’s back tooth balanced on a pin’s head for gold tokens.” Come on.
I should explain primarily that the reason for my white sticky tabs, a step even above that pretentious pastime of penciling-in-the-margins, is because the package of this slim thing is just astounding and insane and as I read it in my office, I have to shove its cover in the face of each hapless visitor with an exuberant, “LOOK-A-DIS COVER!” I’m trying to keep it pristine, keep it a keepsake. Caketrain routinely kills it cover-wise, and Nevers is no different. It’s cerebral Neoclassicism with this Zorro-cum-Kesha face paint (yes) raccooning two 18th-century Bonaparte sisters, holding a folded letter, a list, perhaps, of NEVERS. Never-have-I-, Never-will-I-, evers. What is on Megan Martin’s list?
Well, she somehow evokes diary entry and blog and tweet and manifesto, all wrapped up in pulsating truth, and yeesh is that exactly the worst description I could possibly give now that I re-read it. I am all a-cringe. But that is the thing with Megan Martin. I am hard-pressed to aptly describe the stun ray gun of this collection without quoting her directly, but endless bullet point quotes does not a review make, and anyway just go buy the book. After I read Nevers I went and bought all of Caketrain’s entire shit for like $60 on paypal. They are not giving me money or even a cool tote for saying so!
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/05/30/r...
September 16, 2014
Megan Martin writes powerful prose.
Each brief short in this collection does the work it needs to. The terse vignettes that make up this collection are novel in scope and content, written in a voice that will stick. I like the brutal acknowledgment of less-than-flattering detail. I like the, Either I'm dying this instant or I will kill myself in a bathtub at some later point.
I like the self-awareness of the speaker who, often, finds herself steeping in a pool of talent from which she will never fully emerge, wearing a goddamn bikini and laying on the littered-on lawn in the sun.
I grin so hard that I cry and throw up all over everything.
Lovely. Brilliant.
Each brief short in this collection does the work it needs to. The terse vignettes that make up this collection are novel in scope and content, written in a voice that will stick. I like the brutal acknowledgment of less-than-flattering detail. I like the, Either I'm dying this instant or I will kill myself in a bathtub at some later point.
I like the self-awareness of the speaker who, often, finds herself steeping in a pool of talent from which she will never fully emerge, wearing a goddamn bikini and laying on the littered-on lawn in the sun.
I grin so hard that I cry and throw up all over everything.
Lovely. Brilliant.
October 28, 2019
Loved these bleak, barbed, odd, comic miniatures, which cohere into a kind of phantasmagoria of peculiarly American ennui, fatigue, and despondency marked by arguable illnesses like love, hope, nostalgia. Fits somewhere in the Gordon Lish continuum between Diane Williams and Sam Lipsyte.
Read
June 10, 2014I wrote a review of this that you can read here: http://monkeybicycle.net/book-review-...
July 30, 2014
Michaela Mullin reviews Nevers here: http://www.nomadicsojourns.com/bookan...
January 24, 2015
Somewhere along the pages I found myself lost. I groveled to never find my way home.
June 15, 2023
Reviewed by Michael Nusspickel on www.rowanglassworks.org.
Megan Martin’s Nevers throws you head first into the mind of a manic-depressive writer in a sinking relationship, rarely slowing to answer your questions. The unnamed narrator is every artist dissatisfied with life, raging against their peers, their lovers, their mothers, and most of all themselves. Martin’s prose delivers a punch to the gut followed by a gentle pat on the head. And then it punches you in the gut again, but while you’re still reeling, it does a handstand and you can only look on in bemused delight. Martin captures the feeling of cyclical depression with startling accuracy.
The self-described fictions, too short to be vignettes and too interwoven to be short stories, wind through the peaks of one woman’s odes of love, climbing the cliffs of her manic fever dreams only to drop down into dark valleys of self-loathing and rage. The first few pages are a confession, the narrator declaring to her lover “you are the most amazing creature ever to straddle this planet.” A few pages later, however, the narrator admits that she longs to romance other people, that she will “tell you I love you" and then immediately "worry about running out of eggs,” going through the ordinary motions of daily life despite being unhappy.
This kind of mood whiplash can be disorienting, but in the case of Nevers, that’s a good thing. Riding another person’s sharp mood swings should be disorienting, even overwhelming, because depression is overwhelming, and Martin captures not only the extreme overwhelming lows, but the opposite overwhelming highs. This depression and mania manifests realistically, and paints a portrait of an author coming to terms with their own status as average. As Nevers progresses, the narrator relates this tedium with her decision to live in suburbia: “I am not sure how I became a person who lives here,” she wonders at a pool party. “I wanted to cry. I am too young to have anything to say about real estate! I hope never to have anything to say about it!,” she laments later. The narrator is an artist, but one who despises her colleagues, resents being a responsible adult, and hates her ordinary romance.
The narrator's straightforward revulsion at the mundane makes the more surreal and metaphorical aspects of Nevers difficult to understand at first, with some description bordering on allegory. But in the end, it’s a pleasurable read. It gives an accurate look into the whirlwind mind of a struggling artist, and an intense glimpse into the illogical and damaging mindset of depression. It can leave the reader emotionally wrung out from the intensity, but its overall message is one of solidarity: you aren't the only one feeling this way. There are hundreds of thousands dissatisfied and simply living despite their dreams, and this in its own twisted way is one of life's beauties.
Megan Martin’s Nevers throws you head first into the mind of a manic-depressive writer in a sinking relationship, rarely slowing to answer your questions. The unnamed narrator is every artist dissatisfied with life, raging against their peers, their lovers, their mothers, and most of all themselves. Martin’s prose delivers a punch to the gut followed by a gentle pat on the head. And then it punches you in the gut again, but while you’re still reeling, it does a handstand and you can only look on in bemused delight. Martin captures the feeling of cyclical depression with startling accuracy.
The self-described fictions, too short to be vignettes and too interwoven to be short stories, wind through the peaks of one woman’s odes of love, climbing the cliffs of her manic fever dreams only to drop down into dark valleys of self-loathing and rage. The first few pages are a confession, the narrator declaring to her lover “you are the most amazing creature ever to straddle this planet.” A few pages later, however, the narrator admits that she longs to romance other people, that she will “tell you I love you" and then immediately "worry about running out of eggs,” going through the ordinary motions of daily life despite being unhappy.
This kind of mood whiplash can be disorienting, but in the case of Nevers, that’s a good thing. Riding another person’s sharp mood swings should be disorienting, even overwhelming, because depression is overwhelming, and Martin captures not only the extreme overwhelming lows, but the opposite overwhelming highs. This depression and mania manifests realistically, and paints a portrait of an author coming to terms with their own status as average. As Nevers progresses, the narrator relates this tedium with her decision to live in suburbia: “I am not sure how I became a person who lives here,” she wonders at a pool party. “I wanted to cry. I am too young to have anything to say about real estate! I hope never to have anything to say about it!,” she laments later. The narrator is an artist, but one who despises her colleagues, resents being a responsible adult, and hates her ordinary romance.
The narrator's straightforward revulsion at the mundane makes the more surreal and metaphorical aspects of Nevers difficult to understand at first, with some description bordering on allegory. But in the end, it’s a pleasurable read. It gives an accurate look into the whirlwind mind of a struggling artist, and an intense glimpse into the illogical and damaging mindset of depression. It can leave the reader emotionally wrung out from the intensity, but its overall message is one of solidarity: you aren't the only one feeling this way. There are hundreds of thousands dissatisfied and simply living despite their dreams, and this in its own twisted way is one of life's beauties.
June 1, 2015
I remember the weeks before Nevers came out, the publisher ran a series of images with text from the book like these:
I thought these were really cool.
And then, later, I saw Megan read at Tire Fire in Philly. And that was cool too.
So, now, I have finally read her book, and guess what? It's cool!
I thought these were really cool.
And then, later, I saw Megan read at Tire Fire in Philly. And that was cool too.
So, now, I have finally read her book, and guess what? It's cool!
Read
July 18, 2014Loved it! Not enough stars to give a worthy rating.
December 4, 2014
A few of the pieces are just a tad uneven for my taste. But the heights are pretty impressive, and the hilarious hairpin turns had me laughing out loud.
December 13, 2014
yes and no, yes and no.
April 11, 2021
This book was refreshing, intimate and real. Vaguely feminist and powerful. I laughed, I grimaced, I was affirmed. I read it in just two sittings and I hope you will too.
June 21, 2016
A little too goofy. I wish I had seen it as more than a really interesting, cleverly written blog.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews