Ed Simon

Iron and stained glass, brick and stone, clouds and rain-Pittsburgh is arguably America''s most gothic city. Permeated with an old-world sensibility, this once perennially dark and smoggy metropolis that built its wealth through coke and steel is moody, atmospheric, melancholic, and beautiful. Eschewing contemporary stereotypes that reduce the city to just football or sandwiches with fries on them, The Pittsburgh Tarot expresses the complicated and conflicted period of the city''s greatest expansion and influence during the 19th century. This is the same era that inspired the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot illustrations, and each of the cards in this deck pays homage to those original designs. To that end, The Pittsburgh Tarot features people, events, and themes from the 19th century and through La Belle Epoque, with a special focus on the Gilded Age, the city''s period of greatest significance. With an aesthetic style that calls to mind the gothic work of artist Edward Gorey, this is a beautiful and unique expression of a city that''s as much sentiment and disposition as it is location.

From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain - the exchange of one''s soul in return for untold riches and power - has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. Scholar Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from biblical themes to the Charlie Daniels Band, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from colonialism to nuclear warfare, and even social media, climate change, and AI. In doing so, Simon conveys just how much the Faustian bargain shows us about power and evil... and about ourselves.

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology is a gloriously illustrated overview of angels across art, religion, and literature from scholar Ed Simon, writer for The Millions. Ineffable, invisible, inscrutable—angels are enduring creatures across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine as mediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religious tradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy, sentimental, and saccharine of images: fat babies with wings and guardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripture whenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet or patriarch, they first declare, “Fear not!” for terror would be the most appropriate initial reaction to these otherworldly beings. Angels are often not what we’d expect, but it’s precisely in that transcendent encounter that something of the strangeness of existence can be conveyed. Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology is a follow-up volume to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, offering an account of the angelic hierarchies as they’ve been understood across centuries and cultures, and of the individual personages, such as the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel, who have marked the mythology of the West. Includes Color Illustrations