Major Arcana

John Pistelli
April 22, 2025

“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. 

Advance praise for Major Arcana: 

“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

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John Pistelli is the author of four previous novels: The Ecstasy of Michaela, Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, and The Class of 2000. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Minnesota. He has also published short fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and cultural commentary in a variety of venues. He maintained an award-winning literary blog for almost a decade. He now publishes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture and teaches literature courses online. Find him at johnpistelli.com and grandhotelabyss.substack.com.

ISBN: 978-1953368928 | PAPERBACK | 6 X 9