Major Arcana

“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. 

.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