Name: Major Arcana
Brand: John Pistelli
SKU: 9781953368928
Price: 24.95 USD
Availability: InStock

John Pistelli

Major Arcana

9781953368928

$24.95

“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.

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Sherwood Anderson

Poor White

9781948742009

$14.95

“A story that pays careful attention to what it meant (and means) to live in the Midwest, open to both its charms and its challenges.” —Sarah Laskow, The Millions

Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bidwell, Ohio. He invents a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the burden of famers, but an investor in town exploits his product, which fails to succeed. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a millionaire and transforms Bidwell into a center of manufacturing. McVey, perennially lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends college at nearby Ohio State and is perennially harassed by her potential matches. Published in 1920, one year after his classic short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio, Poor White has a modernist style, a realist attention to everyday life, and an eerily contemporary resonance.

“Belt Revivals wisely brings Anderson back onto the radar during this political moment” —New York Times

“For the past five years, a small press called Belt Publishing has been bringing out intriguing nonfiction books about the Midwest; now they've started a new series called “Belt Revivals,” to publish classic Midwestern fiction as well as nonfiction.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

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Clare Winger Harris

The Artificial Man and Other Stories

9781948742320

$14.95

“Much like Asimov . . . Harris’ stories possess something of the eternal . . . They have retained their power to spark the imagination.” —Tangent Online

Science fiction has historically been seen as a man’s game, but from the very beginning, women have made their indelible mark on the genre. One of science fiction’s pioneers, Claire Winger Harris is credited as the first woman to publish under her own name in sci-fi magazines.

In Harris’s world, you’ll find gigantic insects, Martians looking to steal Earth’s water, and time travel to ancient Rome. Scholar Brad Ricca assembles ten of Harris's greatest short stories here, including “The Fifth Dimension,” “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” “The Menace of Mars,” and “The Vibrometer.” Their ideas are as fresh today as when Harris originally wrote them a century ago.

A wonderful collection by a little-known master of science fiction, this book will hold interest for feminist readers and scholars of sci-fi alike.

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Jon Wynn

The Set Up

9781953368942

$20.00

Ally, an aspiring actress, is about to give up on getting her big break. But then, after another disappointing audition, a charismatic scene partner says he has a fun gig for her. Soon, Ally is making easy money working for a guerrilla-marketing outfit called The Set Up. Now she's getting lots of practice pretending to be someone she's not-but each job seems more suspicious than the last.

Marshall is a washed-up journalist, teaching a summer class at the university and struggling to keep his students (and himself) focused on his planned lessons. Someone has been leaving copies of his old articles on his lectern every morning, forcing him to revisit the story of a decades-old tragedy and mistakes he's made … both personal and professional.

Web, a quirky loner, has always been ready to pick up and go at a moment's notice. In fact, he's very good at not being noticed, at least not unless he wants to be. That's been helpful in his years working for the Set Up, but the new hire's questions are starting to make Web feel less confident about his work as a con man.

What is the Set Up, and who's playing whom? The search for answers leads Ally, Web, and Marshall from the glitz of the Strip to the grit of Sin City's strip-mall suburbs, and from an abandoned Unification compound to a deadly bar mitzvah. As their paths converge, this unlikely trio uncover the shadowy power dynamics and shifting personalities that shape a city.

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Edna Ferber

The Girls

9781953368492

$24.00

With “much humor” and “awareness of family dynamics” this classic novel “stands as an enduring portrait of women torn between duty and self-fulfillment”(Publishers Weekly).

First published in 1921, Edna Ferber’s The Girls revolves around the “three Charlottes” of the Thrift family—Great-Aunt Charlotte, her niece Lottie, and Lottie’s niece Charley. All single “old maids,” as the narrator describes them, their lives weave together as they deal with issues involving money, work, friendship, family, and love as they strive to join Chicago’s growing middle class in the early twentieth century.

With a historic span that travels from the Civil War to World War I, Ferber highlights how the three generations of Charlottes lead very different lives. But we also see the ways their experiences rhyme with one another and how, despite the social advances in America, as Kathleen Rooney writes in her introduction, all three have to confront “a sexist and claustrophobic societal atmosphere in which any little act of self-assertion can feel like a leap from a precipice.”
Told through Ferber’s assured and generous style, and full of her signature strong female characters, The Girls is an American classic.

“This is one of those books that nails setting and character so well that plot is mostly beside the point. . . . Ferber splits the difference with clearer prose and keener insight than [Sister Carrie author Theodore] Dreiser managed, while incorporating some of the same dry humor that [Babbitt author Sinclair] Lewis used to describe midwestern strivers.” —Dmitry Samarov, Chicago Reader

“Written with such verve and insight that it could be a piece of historical fiction produced last week.” —Patrick T. Reardon, Third Coast Review

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Charles W Chesnutt

The Marrow of Tradition

9781948742344

$14.95

The classic, fictionalized account of a white supremacist insurrection in Reconstruction Era North Carolina—with a new introduction by Wiley Cash.

On November 10, 1898, a mob of 400 people rampaged through the streets of Wilmington, North Carolina. In a violent reaction to the political power gained by African Americans during Reconstruction, the mob killed as many as sixty citizens, overthrew elected leaders, and installed a white supremacist government. The Wilmington Insurrection—also known as the Wilmington Race Riots and the Wilmington Massacre—was the only successful coup d’etat on American soil.

The Marrow of Tradition is a fictionalized account of this important yet overlooked event. Charles W. Chesnutt, a North Carolina native and America’s first black professional writer, narrates the story of “Wellington” North Carolina through the eyes of William Miller, a Black doctor, and his wife, Janet, who is both Black and the unclaimed daughter of a prominent white businessman.

With these and dozens of other characters, including a Black domestic servant whose speech is rendered in vernacular dialect, Chesnutt conjures a nuanced portrait of Reconstruction—a turbulent time of historic progress and vicious backlash.

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Harold Frederic

The Damnation of Theron Ware

9781948742184

$14.95

This nineteenth-century classic about the fall of a Methodist minister is “of great interest both as a novel and as a double-barrelled social document” (Manchester Guardian).

The Damnation of Theron Ware is the story of a young pastor who comes to a small town in the Adirondacks to spread the gospel. Once he gets there, his congregation slowly leads him down a path of secular enlightenment, encouraging him to question the very same scripture he has devoted his life to. Through new friends, he has encounters beautiful art and music and gains new insights into the world of Darwinian science. But when he finds himself carried away by these fresh new experiences, where they lead him is not at all what he expected.

A forerunner of the classic naturalistic novels of the early twentieth century, Harold Frederic’s work is considered one of the great American novels of his time.
“Containing the realism of Howells, the moral complexity of James, and the comic manner of Mark Twain, the novel—a finer book, incidentally, than Lewis’s Elmer Gantry—warrants reading.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The combination of delicate mannerliness and merciless savagery with which Frederic sets about abasing Theron is not easy to describe; but, if one could make the admittedly prodigious effort of imagining an Emma written from the point of view of Mr. Elton by an ebullient exile from Utica, New York . . . some idea of its shocking comprehensivity might be grasped.” —Times Literary Supplement

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Hamlin Garland

Main-Travelled Roads

9781948742030

$24.00

This classic short story collection offers an unblinking portrait of the American Midwest during a time of intense change.

Originally published in 1891, Main-Travelled Roads includes eleven short stories set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or the region of America Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.” Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland’s radical, realist stories—written in a mode he called “veritism”—refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest.

Unrelenting, yet infused with a hopeful vision of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly beautiful. Main-Travelled Roads was Garland’s first major success, a little-known classic of American literature and the Midwest.

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Willa Cather

One of Ours

9781948742535

$24.00

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a Nebraska farmer. As a young man, Claude is dissatisfied with Nebraska farm like as well as his marriage to a childhood friend, desperate for a more cosmopolitan life. When America joins the Great War, Claude decides to enlist, where he finds excitement and fulfillment--as well as tragedy--on the battlefield.

One of Ours was considered a failure by some male critics of the day: H. L. Mencken said it drops to the level of a serial in the Ladies' Home Journal, fought out not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot, and Ernest Hemingway panned Cather for not having experienced the front-line herself.

However, the Pulitzer committee considered it the greatest novel of the year, and this accessible, dramatic novel sold many more copies than Cather's more famous ones, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia.

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Booth Tarkington

Alice Adams

9781540270061

$18.00

Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1921 novel about a young woman's close encounter with her social striving dreams, now republished in a gorgeous new edition.

Alice Adams is young and pretty, but is struggling to improve her station. Her world revolves around dances put on by richer girls, for which she ingeniously strives to turn her less fashionable dress into something more fashionable and explain away the embarrassing behavior of her younger brother. Money structures this unnamed small town in the Midwest, but Alice’s father has never made much of himself, thus foiling her mother’s constant desire to see Alice and the rest of the family better situated. Will Alice’s future prospects improve when finally Mr. Adams decides to go into business for himself making glue? Will her latest handsome, kind suitor stay around long enough for an engagement? Or will the pernicious forces of greed, gossip, and in 1920s America bring them all down?

Booth Tarkington’s novel was published when his fame was at its height: Tarkington was considered the preeminent American novelist of the day, a celebrity who would also serve a term representing his native Indiana in Congress. Alice Adams was similarly famous for decades after its publication; the 1935 movie starring Katherine Hepburn based on the novel was nominated for Best Picture by the Academy Awards. Today, this lauded chronicler of the Midwest is lesser read but no less fascinating, and his novels as worthy, suspenseful, and poignant as they were a century ago.

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Dawn Powell

She Walks in Beauty

9781953368959

$18.00

A coming-of-age story of two sisters living in their grandmother’s boarding house in a small Ohio town just before the first world war and the characters who filter in an out of the house and their lives.

For teenager Linda Shirley, her residence in a family boarding house is a fact to be hidden, ignored, and, eventually, escaped. She aims for a better life and tries desperately to win the approval of the town’s elite, particularly the popular Courtenay Stall, over whom she pines. Her younger sister, Dorrie, is a dreamer who not only tolerates but often delights in the colorful guests of the house, from the reluctantly retired theater troupers to the glamorous young woman of ill-repute, the bed-bound intellectual in the attic to the circus snake charmer who keeps her “babies” in ill-secured boxes under her bed.

For Dawn Powell, “satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.” She Walks in Beauty is a satire in the most insightful sense, showing the specific clarity and cloudiness of two very different sisters’ worldviews. This Belt Revivals edition includes a new introduction by critic Ilana Masad.

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Aaron Foley

Boys Come First

9781953368256

$21.95

Three Black gay millennial men look for love, friendship, and professional success in the Motor City in this hilarious and touching debut novel.

Suddenly jobless and single after a devastating layoff and a breakup with his cheating ex, advertising copywriter Dominick Gibson flees his life in Hell’s Kitchen for a fresh start in his hometown of Detroit. He’s got one objective—exit the shallow dating pool ASAP and get married by thirty-five—and the deadline’s approaching fast.

Meanwhile, Dom’s best friend, Troy Clements, an idealistic teacher who never left Michigan, finds himself at odds with all the men in his life: a troubled boyfriend he’s desperate to hold onto, a perpetually dissatisfied father, and his other friend, Remy Patton. Remy, a rags-to-riches real estate agent known as “Mr. Detroit,” has his own problems—namely choosing between making it work with a long-distance lover or settling for a local Mr. Right Now who’s not quite Mr. Right. And when a high-stakes real estate deal threatens to blow up his friendship with Troy, the three men must figure out how to navigate the pitfalls of friendship and a city that seems to be changing overnight.

Full of unforgettable characters, Boys Come First is about the trials and tribulations of real friendship, but also about the highlights and hiccups—late nights at the wine bar, awkward Grindr hookups, workplace microaggressions, situationships, frenemies, family drama, and of course, the group chat—that define Black, gay, millennial life in today’s Detroit.

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Susan Glaspell

Fidelity

9781540270153

$20.00

A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

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Frank Norris

The Pit

9781455629060

$20.00

Financial ambition, a tortured marriage, and an American city on the rise are brilliantly depicted in Frank Norris’ 1903 masterpiece. Curtis Jadwin is obsessed with speculating on the market, manipulating it so he can control the nation’s wheat supply. He neglects his wife, Laura, who seeks refuge in the arts, and in particular one artist, Sheldon Corthell. The Jadwin’s wealth buys them a mansion on Lincoln Park with an art gallery that strangers gawk at, but inside they struggle. And is Jadwin’s gambling sustainable, or is there a bear market in his future?

Curtis and Laura play out this American Dream scenario in the streets of Chicago, where they attend the opera at the Auditorium Building, visit the new art museum on the lake, and, from the comfort of their carriage, watch the trains and grain elevators. At the Board of Trade, in the pit, men yell and knock against each other, performing the theater of capitalism in front of an always crowded visitor’s gallery.

Few novels depict the struggles of marriage, the world of finance, or the rise of Chicago from the flatlands of the Midwest, as viscerally as this novel, originally published in 1903. Norris’s novel may immerse readers in a historic setting, but it’s punishing and profound themes are anything but dated.

This Belt Revivals edition features archival photographs and an introduction by Whet Moser.

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Glenway Wescott

Goodbye, Wisconsin

9781540270313

$20.00

A collection of stories, originally published in 1928, from the author of The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk.

A couple set fire to an old farmhouse to collect insurance money. A groom contemplates an old sexual escapade while he waits for his bride at the altar. A young farm boy returns to tell his brother about his capers while stationed in France in the Navy. The eleven stories in this collection, including an introductory essay by Wescott on returning to his parents’ West Allis home outside Milwaukee, deal with themes of exile—often self-imposed—and return.

This Belt Revivals edition features a new introduction by Patrick Nathan.