Major Arcana

By: John Pistelli

Narrated by: Nick Mills

“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] deliriously creative tour-de-force … For fans of expansive, thought-provoking, and challenging fiction, this is a breathtakingly imaginative and enjoyable novel."—Alexander Moran, Booklist, starred review

©2025 John Pistelli (P)2025 Recorded Books

Worth it.

This book definitely has some difficult parts. At least for myself. I know that John Pistelli is so much smarter than I am and I’m ok with that! This book when it came to a closing, when loose ends got tied, and closure happened brought tears to my eyes that I have not experienced in years from a book. This book will be stay with me. It’s a part of me now and I will forever be changed.