Substack & Acquisition

the unusual backstory to Belt's latest screenshotted deal

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with an author of a new novel on Ross Barkan’s Substack. Barkan’s called the book “a significant work of literature” and “perhaps…the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.” Huh! I thought, and kept reading.

The author, John Pistelli, who had been publishing this novel in chapters on his newsletter, in very cool retro-Dickensian fashion. fascinating things to say in the interview. For instance:

My main ambition was to restore ambition itself to the American novel, particularly the idea that the novel is a form perfectly suited to encompass the complexities and possibilities of the present, even if this present threatens, as Philip Roth complained in 1961, to outpace the novelistic imagination. This ambition necessarily includes writing about many different types and classes of people and milieux, of daring to use an omniscient narrator, rather than the consciously limited voice of the “I” that has become so prominent over the course of this century with its autofiction vogue and its fears about “cultural appropriation.” A literature cannot thrive under such conditions of modesty and timidity, cannot live in a world of fear. The novel especially flourishes the more reality it has to feed on and to transfigure. Without nostalgia, I wanted to hark back to—and to update for the present—the kind of American novel that was celebrated as recently as the 1990s with such works as McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Morrison’s Paradise, Roth’s American Pastoral, Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys, or DeLillo’s Underworld, novels and novel-series obviously built on the high model of American Romantic and cosmopolitan modernist fiction (Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, To the Lighthouse, Invisible Man, etc.) rather than tailoring themselves to suit the transient demands of activists or the supposed preference of readers for easier televisual pleasures.

After reading this interview, which spoke to my cold, overeducated-in-American-literature heart, too often underwhelmed by the latest literary fiction darling, I downloaded the novel, which Pistelli had self-published, upon completion, to my Kindle, and started it immediately. To my delight and flash of recognition, the first scene takes place a fictional few blocks where I live, on the campus of the fictional University of Pittsburgh, and the main character is an adjunct in the English Department, teaching comics history. Tarot (which is a strangely large part of Belt Publishing) is important to both the plot and the form of the book. Huh! I thought.

So it didn’t take me long to email Pistelli to see if he might be interested in having Belt reissue the novel. Meanwhile, I spent the weekend finishing Major Arcana, which is breathtaking in its breadth, its willingness to be maximalist and to express Big Ideas through characters, a feature of the best of the best novels, in my opinion, plus its cleverness in updating Kavalier & Clay (one of the best novels of the past 50 years imo), and its refusal to be whittled down and smoothed out as is so much current fictional fare. Then I spent more time reading Pistelli’s extraordinary Goodreads reviews of canonical works, his online, free college courses, and his criticism. This man is brilliant, prodigious, and generous.

To my delight, John responded to my email saying he was open, and we had a blast talking about the book, and about how traditional publishing works, and —oh look!—today, the screenshot went live.

There are multiple reasons I find this acquisition energizing: I’ve long wanted to explore traditional and self-publishing partnerships; the audacious act of originally publishing a novel serially on Substack; the ways Pistelli thinks about the form of the novel, and the history of the novel, and of course the immersive, referential, social novel of Major Arcana itself.

I’ll have fun helping this book more readers (suggestions welcome!). It will be Belt’s third novel, following our 2022 Boys Come First, and a mystery we are also publishing next spring by Jonathan Wynn (because you never expect the chair of Sociology at UMass Amherst to send you a fun, page-turning mystery about Las Vegas and city planning!)

Do not fear, my friends in nonfiction: we are hungry to find more of you, too. We would love to hear about your (or your client’s) idea for 45K-ish word book about a place, or a topic related to a place, or a 50 Maps book for a new city in our series, or maybe a cookbook about an underloved ingredient, or an anthology of a city we haven’t published about yet. You can find out more about what we are looking to acquire, and how to query us, here.

Finally, here’s to readers. Ross Barkan is singularly responsible for this acquisition, and it is only because he took the time to read an unheralded (in the traditional sense) book, write about it smartly, and interview the author. That took a lot of work on his part. Of writers we have plenty; it’s the readers (and those who truly understand and share their reading) we should be looking towards.