PGHwrites: Ed Simon’s “American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States” (Book Launch)

Photo Courtesy: Ed Simon

With his finger on the pulse, Ed Simon has assembled 50 powerful tinctures of masterful insight and cultural criticism in his latest work, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States. The work strives to remind us that before there was the United States, there was America, and that everything we view as “American” has been a 250-year series of inventions and adaptations. 

The Declaration of Independence promised to forge a nation dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a result, American society and culture have always existed within the gulf of our stated aspirations and the actual reality. In American Elegy, Ed Simon takes a hard look at our reality, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence—a reality in which the United States is succumbing to authoritarianism and the noxious blood-and-soil nationalism that curses the faith in the universal and indispensable America.

In response to this moment, Ed Simon offers a rejoinder, presenting 50 asynchronously organized works of flash criticism, meant to draw connections across time periods, each celebrating an aspect of the “America” that is larger, deeper, and broader than the mere United States. Here, the Great American Novel meets the Great American Songbook; sign language converses with the blues; method acting shares the stage with Afrofuturism, and Superman plays baseball. Defining “literature” as broadly as possible, each of the works profiled critiques the status quo and imagines a better world.

Ed Simon has provided not just an elegy, but a challenge, a celebration, a repository, an archive, and a call to start over, charting a course to a land still undiscovered.

This reading will be followed by a book signing and a public reception with complimentary hors d’oeuvres for all attendees. 

You can purchase a copy of Ed’s book, American Elegy, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Ed 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. In addition, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Belt Magazine and a contributing editor to The Montreal Review. He is also an emeritus staff writer at The Millions, and a monthly columnist for both 3 Quarks Daily and LitHub. In addition to those roles, Simon has been the Creative Nonfiction Editor at Carnegie Mellon University Press since 2024. Simon is the author of over a dozen books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh from Belt Publishing, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology from Abrams, and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain from Melville House, named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. Currently, he is finishing, among other projects, a defense of purple prose for Princeton University Press and a series of essays about our apocalyptic times for Bloomsbury Academic. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The New York Times, among dozens of others, while his anonymous reviews appear in Publishers Weekly. Originally a native of Pittsburgh, Ed has lived in New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and has taught as a college instructor at various institutions for two decades.

About Your Visit: 

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