Jeff Jackson is a novelist, playwright, visual artist, and songwriter. His second novel Destroy All Monsters was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in Fall 2018. It received advanced praise from Don DeLillo, Janet Fitch, Dana Spiotta, Ben Marcus, and Dennis Cooper. His novella Novi Sad was published as a limited edition art book and selected for "Best of 2016" lists in Vice, Lit Reactor, and Entropy. His first novel Mira Corpora, published in 2013, was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and featured on numerous "Best of the Year" lists, including Slate, Salon, The New Statesman, and Flavorwire. His short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Vice, New York Tyrant, and The Collagist and been performed in New York and Los Angeles by New River Dramatists.
As a playwright, six of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning Collapsable Giraffe company in New York City. Vine of the Dead: 11 Ritual Gestures debuted in 2016 at the Westbeth Arts Center. Dream of the Red Chamber: Performance for a Sleeping Audience, an adaptation of the epic Chinese novel, debuted in Times Square in 2014 to rave reviews. Botanica was selected by the New York Times as "one of 2012's most galvanizing theater moments."
He holds an M.F.A. from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hambidge Center.
* One of the Best Books of 2013. --Slate, Salon, Flavorwire,
Largehearted Boy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor"To read Jeff
Jackson's Mira Corpora is to enter into a trance state. A hypnotic,
brutal, and lyric exploration of youth, trauma and the construction
of memory, this novel is like nothing I've ever read before and is,
unquestionably, one of my favorite books published this year."
--Laura van den Berg, Salon"Skilfully told in clear yet somehow
utterly disorientating prose."
--NewStatesman, Books of the Year: favorite reading of 2014"In Mira
Corpora, Jeff Jackson's remarkable nightmarish fugue of a novel,
the novel itself becomes the exemplification of the writer's
routine. The novel feels like the beating of a heart, the body of a
fledgling waiting to be born. The more you read the more the heart
races."
--Tweed's"I was ensnared by [Mira Corpora's] strange beauty."
--Electric Literature"The autobiographical novel has taken many
twists in recent years, but few writers have managed the feat with
the vision and audacity of Jeff Jackson. The novel is a strange,
quixotic beast--constantly raw, shape-shifting and rooted in the
origins of tribal ritual. Mira Corpora is an incandescent wonder...
Jackson structures the novel around a collection of surreal,
teenage journals that explore the subterranean territory of the
self. Whether these origins arise from real artefact or a fictional
device is irrelevant in the skill of the author's hands... Mira
Corpora is an incandescent wonder."
--Darragh McKeon"A piercing howl of a book. Slyly seductive and
utterly gripping--[Jackson's] prose practically crackles and
sparks. This punk coming-of-age story smolders long after the book
is through."
--Slate"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."
--Bookforum"[Mira Corpora] reads like an incantation--more like a
hex--and to put it down is to break the spell."
--Trop Magazine"Mira Corpora is a bildungsroman perhaps made most
moving by this fact: that the book bears not the trace of an absent
chess-master moving markers of sexual obsession in preformatted
patterns, but rather the fumbling hand of enchanter attempting to
divine the nature of his spell-in-progress, caught at a moment of
pseudo-sexual ecstasy, between either self-release or
self-annihilation."
--The Brooklyn Rail
"Provocative, dreamlike, and just a bit meta, Mira Corpora is an
impressive debut. It reads like a bullet, a slow motion bullet time
bullet, viewable from multiple angles, like in The Matrix."
--LitReactor"I'd characterize Mira Corpora as a seduction. It
heightens the pulse and warps the mind with the allure and
cliffhangers of a sexy action flick."
--Full Stop"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."
--Vice"Mira Corpora is a masterfully written debut, an often brutal
coming of age tale as unsettling as it is brilliant."
--Largehearted Boy"Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson's eerie and
enigmatic debut. The prose works like the expressionless masks worn
by killers in horror films."
--Wall Street Journal"What's most compelling--and terrifying... is
the originality and execution. [Mira Corpora] has a very cinematic
quality to it, like the dreamscapes of a Lynch, or, better, a
strange, filmic mash-up of Lord of the Flies, Demian, and House of
Leaves, as directed by Harmony Korine. Jackson really captures that
quintessential dreamlike quality of Korine's films in his
presentation of unfamiliar versions of familiar settings. This
creates a powerful, frightening effect."
--Impose"Impressive."
--Eimear McBride (author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) in
TimeOut NY"Jackson's ability to evoke the growing perceptions and
shifting vantage of his narrator makes the episodic quality of Mira
Corpora work especially well."
--Vol. 1 Brooklyn"[A] mesmerizing debut, which reads like some
cross between Bruno Schulz and the backstories of random characters
from Penelope Spheeris' 1984 film Suburbia. It's the overarching
sensibility that also puts Mira Corpora in a unique group of books
that can only be dubbed Punk Lit."
--Flavorwire"Jeff Jackson's surreal, wrenching debut novel Mira
Corpora is a book we suspect you'll hear a lot about in the coming
months."
--Vol. 1 Brooklyn"Jackson's prose captures a dreamlike tone that
gives the reader the experience of walking into an abandoned house
of mirrors where every pane of glass is as clouded over and
obscuring and oddly beautiful as the next."
--Fanzine"A gutter punk Catcher in the Rye."
--Shelf Awareness"Best new books of fall 2013."
--Time Out Chicago"A ripping yarn. Jackson's short, visceral
sentences fuel the novel's page-turning momentum. But a
hallucinatory quality permeates events throughout. Paintings take
on extra dimensions; music has talismanic powers; the city is as
feral as the forest. In the meta-fiction tradition of Thomas
Pynchon or Stephen Wright, Jackson's story questions our
assumptions and demands our participation. Here, a novelist's
"mysterious pigments" make for a non-idealized--and far more
participatory and compelling--take on the coming-of-age tale."
--Creative Loafing"This is superb. Jackson is a great storyteller,
and this one offers a strange combination of grittiness and poetry
that I'm really digging."
--Entropy
"Brilliant work... This book is both brutal and beautiful and it
brings something approaching resolution, if not redemption."
--City Paper (Baltimore)
"Jackson's voice is gripping. It's refreshing to see an author
craft a novel according to his own vision."
--The Rumpus"The plot line sounds familiar, but Jackson's handling
of it subverts that familiarity and puts it to unique, unsettling
purposes."
--Heavy Feather Review
"An often sordid and savage phantasmagoria [that] blurs the
boundaries between the real and the imaginary, creating an
unsettling allegory of growth into adulthood."
--Publishers Weekly"Wow... a revelation... This reminds me of the
excellent quote by Paul Eluard that opens the novella: "There is
another world, but it is in this one." And, indeed, another world
does seem to open up within this one as you proceed through Mira
Corpora's riveting yet fractured pages."
--nicholauspatnaude.com"It's fine work in its manic pacing and its
summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a
vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out
there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the
face."
--Don DeLillo
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