Book Launch: Author Event & Signing with Ed Simon for "American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States"

"Compiling an assemblage that’s less a canon than a cultural mixtape, Simon presents fifty short chapters that are asynchronously organized works of flash criticism, meant to draw connections across time periods, which each celebrating an aspect of the “America” that’s larger, deeper, and broader than the mere United States. As cynical politicians deny the diversity, complexity, and actual beauty of American culture in favor of myths about the nation being made great again, Simon provides not just an elegy, but a challenge and celebration, as well as a repository, an archive, and a call to start over." - IG PublishingEd Simon is the author of over a dozen books, including The Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, The New Republic and The New York Times, among others. Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Belt Magazine, and Creative Nonfiction Editor at Carnegie Mellon University Press.