Major Arcana

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Pub Date Apr 22 2025 | Archive Date Apr 15 2025
Arcadia Publishing | Belt Publishing

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Description

“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. 

“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...


A Note From the Publisher

.A few months ago I read a Substack newsletter that described a newly released novel as “better than almost any fiction being produced today,” an heir to the monumental books by Don DeLillo and David Mitchell as well as classic nineteenth-century novels. It had been published serially, in Dickensian fashion, one week and chapter at a time, on the author’s own Substack.

I was fascinated by this experiment that led a critic I admire to gush, calling it “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.”

Curious, I downloaded a copy—as a reader, not a publisher. But as soon as I started the first chapter, which takes place a fictionalized few blocks from where I live in Pittsburgh, I realized that I was also reading it as a publisher, since Belt specializes in books by and about the Rust Belt.

I spent the next week immersed in the world John Pistelli creates in this ambitious, timely, and brainy novel. Pistelli knows his literary history, and draws upon the history of American Romanticism—witches in New England! Occultism!—and Realism—two friends write bestselling and controversial comics based on beloved superhero characters? Is this not a nod to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with Alan Moore as the fictionalized
comics creator? He also knows our twenty-first-century internet-pilled lives, with a Gen Z plotline about manifestation, gender fluidity, tarot, and Youtube that helps us see our current moment afresh.

I hope you will give Major Arcana a chance and consider reviewing!

Anne Trubek-Publisher, Belt Publishing

.A few months ago I read a Substack newsletter that described a newly released novel as “better than almost any fiction being produced today,” an heir to the monumental books by Don DeLillo and David...


Advance Praise

“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.” — Ross Barkan

“Major Arcana is a bravura, hallucinatory tarot of art, madness, and the fatal poignance of being alive. To read it is to hold the heart of the world in one’s hands.” -Bruce Wagner, author of The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers

“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...


Marketing Plan

-National media outreach

-Feature at key trade events including Winter Institute/ALA/Heartland

-Widespread indie bookseller outreach

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. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota

-National media outreach

-Feature at key trade events including Winter Institute/ALA/Heartland

-Widespread indie bookseller outreach

John Pistelli is the author of The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781953368928
PRICE 24.99
PAGES 344

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