Kirjahaku

Julia is an aspiring painter without money or direction, haunted by a strange family history. Mark is a successful architect who suddenly finds himself unemployed with a baby on the way. Alice is a well-known artist and museum curator disgraced when her last exhibit proved fatal. Running from their failures, this trio is drawn toward a strange new cult that seeks to obliterate the individual-and which may be the creation of a mysterious and dangerous avant-garde artist. John Pistelli unforgettably portrays three people desperate to lead meaningful lives as they confront the bizarre new institutions of a fraying America. A suspenseful and poetic novel in the visionary tradition of Don DeLillo, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jos Saramago, PORTRAITS AND ASHES is a scorching picture of our troubled age.

"A pandemic-related lockdown tests the residents of an apartment building in this nicely considered outing from Pistelli... This thought-provoking exploration of quarantine life offers plenty of tension." (Publishers Weekly)A global pandemic has America under quarantine. In a run-down apartment building, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, five people-a philosopher, an academic, a filmmaker, a sculptor, and a philanthropist-come together, at first only for the pleasure of company. Then they find themselves in a ferocious debate about the obsessions that drive their lives and a ruthless quest to discover the secrets that brought them together. Their passions and betrayals play out against the dangerous backdrop of a state-enforced lockdown and a disease that can strike anyone at any time. The eventually explosive conflicts among these poor artists, underfed intellectuals, and desperate fanatics pose urgent questions of art and inequality, health and freedom, faith and power, love and death. The first work of long-form fiction to emerge from the events of 2020, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House is a fresh narrative for a new era.

"A deliriously creative tour-de-force ... a breathtakingly imaginative and enjoyable novel." (Booklist, starred review)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.