Major Arcana: A Novel

“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.

Ross Barkan

“Pistelli is sweeping and satiric, tender and deliciously strange; a fine melding of Don DeLillo, Alan Moore, and the great noticers of the human condition who came barreling through the nineteenth century. A tremendous and serious book, it is better than almost any fiction being produced today.”

About the Author

John Pistelli is the author of The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and The Ecstasy of Michaela and has written for The Millions, Rain Taxi, The Spectator and other outlets. A longtime teacher with a PhD in English, he hosts discussions and lectures on literary history for the public. Major Arcana was originally serialized on Pistelli’s newsletter, where he also publishes literary and cultural criticism. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota --This text refers to the paperback edition.

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