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The Ecstasy of Michaela
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Michaela is no saint. Living alone in a decaying rust-belt city at the end of the twentieth century, her life completely adrift, she grudgingly attends her estranged mother’s funeral. There she learns about the grisly murder of a local boy named Tony Zabelsky. She becomes obsessed with his story and begins haunting the places he frequented until she meets his former lover,
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John Pistelli sketches a dying rust belt city in a dusky charcoal haze tainted by deep red splatters of blood and wealth. It is a coming of age narrative. It is a meditation on late capitalism and the consequences of eschewing social expectations. It is an elegy to independent thought. What happens to a city when the thing that defines it – the industry that built it – is no longer there? What happens to a person when the ideals, the values, the ethics that guide them are offered up in exchange
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A headless corpse, a murder mystery, a dystopian look at a decaying rustbelt city and a rumination on religion and post-modern society in one compact package. Kudos to Pistelli. Write more.
Pistelli's dystopic post-industrial novella creates an almost suffocating environment for its characters while at the same time making the reader skeptical of all viewpoints expressed. In short, a brilliant use of several unreliable narrators to simultaneously tell us a story of anomie, death and redemption, of sorts.
Pistelli's beautiful language moves the readers through Michaela's world seamlessly while evoking her role as confessor to the books other characters. I look forward to more work fr
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John Pistelli is from Pittsburgh, PA, and now lives in Minneapolis, MN, where he teaches literature. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota. His short fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in many journals, including Rain Taxi, The Millions, and Five 2 One. He is the author of The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and
The Ecstasy of Michael
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Why not focus on some serious family drama? Not yours, of course, but a fictional family whose story you can follow through the generations of...
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