Major Arcana

This is a funny, sad and smart, but also hopeful, satire of American culture, a sprawling, spanning-decades novel in the Jonathan Franzen mould. Starting (misleadingly?) with the suicide of a student on campus, it rewinds through the backstories of several generations of characters, adding a splash......more

I normally don't put stars with my reviews but I wanted to signal boost this self-published-soon-to-be-small-press-published book. I don't have any connection with the author, a friend of mine just talked it up so much that I picked it up, and I was really glad! The book is compulsively readable. It......more

[Full review (with footnotes) at [URL not allowed]] John Pistelli’s serialised-on-Substack novel opens with what Camus called the only truly serious philosophical question.12 A male student in an oversized army jacket shoots himself in the head with a vintage revolver; a classm......more

Es ist sehr selten, dass jemand einen Roman mit einigen Figuren schreibt, die sich nicht als männlich oder weiblich definieren und es nebenher schafft, glaubhaft und nicht konservativ darzustellen, dass das mit den Pronomen dann ganz schön nervt. (Obwohl ich den Roman definitiv als queer und woke le......more

As the pull quote on the back says, MA sets its sights on being a big, expansive, lively novel about the present and in this I would say it certainly succeeds. However the main thing I’ve been thinking about in my notes on it is nostalgia in general. There are two timelines in this novel, with two d......more