Four Complete Novels for Paid Subscribers
Portraits and Ashes | The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House | The Class of 2000 | Major Arcana
Jun 06, 2023
∙ Paid
Dear paid subscribers,
As a token of my appreciation for your support, I offer below complete pdf files of my four published novels. Please enjoy!
Thank you,
John
A novel by John Pistelli | Published June 2017 | 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 José Saramago, PORTRAITS AND ASHES is a scorching picture of our troubled age.
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A novella by John Pistelli | Published May 2020 | "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.
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A novel by John Pistelli | Published October 2021 | "Back in the suburbs, it was always autumn…" The year is 1999. The Internet is young, the Millennium is coming, and hopes abound for peace and progress in a globalized world. But in the prosperous suburbs of a Pittsburgh still in its post-industrial decline, a fiery tragedy explodes. It begins when a charismatic teacher who has a dangerous habit of trying to save the lives of his students takes in a high-school senior with a catastrophically violent family. The teacher quickly invites his student to join his private and bloody crusade to right the wrongs of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the teacher's brilliant and nihilistic wife, a frustrated former actress, has her own designs on the young man, intellectual and otherwise. The ensuing conflagration threatens to destroy everyone involved, but as these characters confront the hopes and disorders of an age, a tragic heroism rises from their struggle. A drama about the danger of good intentions and how the dreams and ambitions of a generation went wrong, THE CLASS OF 2000 is an impassioned and inventive family saga in the grand tradition of the American novel.
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A novel by John Pistelli | Published March 2024 | It begins with a gunshot: a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this 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 transfigured the English language, and Ash del Greco, an occultist influencer who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove to the world the superiority of mind over matter. With its decades-spanning but fateful plot, written in an expansive and Argus-eyed style alive to every urgent question of our time, 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. With this, his fifth book, John Pistelli reinvents the novel for the 21st century.
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