Many thanks to Gabriel Opare—author of the new collection, The Face of Poverty Is Black & Other Poems, poems beguilingly subversive in content and traditional in form—for this endorsement!
New readers might be asking, “What is Portraits and Ashes?” Here is the text from the back cover:
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.
If you want an absorbing summer novel, Portraits and Ashes can be purchased in both print and ebook formats. Thank you for reading!
