Major Arcana - Paperback

by John Pistelli (Author)

"Perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century."

It begins with a gunshot: a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this tragic explosion expands to encompass 50 years of our history and two of the grandest characters in recent American fiction: Simon Magnus, a comic-book writer who transfigured popular culture turned gender activist who transfigures the English language, and Ash del Greco, an online occultist who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter. With a decades-spanning but tightly-knit plot, written in an expansive style, Major Arcana canvasses America's inner life and moral history from coast to coast and across two generations in a delirious saga about art, magic, love, and death.

Originally serialized on the author's Substack newsletter, Major Arcana is a novel about the transformative power of popular culture. With a nod to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Pistelli reimagines the expansive novel for the 21st century.

Author Biography

John Pistelli is the author of bestselling Substack Grand Hotel Abyss, home of a regular newsletter called Weekly Readings and the literary podcast The Invisible College, as well as the eight-year archive of an award-winning literary blog at johnpistelli.com. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota and has been writing and teaching for almost two decades. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.