Ed Simon is a staff writer for Lit Hub, the editor of Belt Magazine, and the author of numerous books, including most recently Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, and Relic, part of the Object Lessons series.
In the summer of 2024 Melville House will release his Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, the first comprehensive, popular account of that subject.
At Lit Hub Simon tagged fifteen "literary works with jazz at their center which have given 'special overtones' to words." One title on the list:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible ManRead about another entry on the list.
Arguably the greatest American novel of the twentieth-century’s second half, Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of Black disenfranchisement and alienation is still capable of shocking and elucidating the national racial divide all these decades later through the author’s acute existential imagination. What can’t be obscured in that is the central role that jazz plays in the formation of the anonymous narrator’s consciousness, how as Ellison charts the musical transitions from swing to bop, of how music “can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.”
Invisible Man comes in second on the list of the 100 best last lines from novels; it appears among Ben Okri's six best books, Matthew Guerrieri's five top books inspired by Beethoven's Fifth, Bruna Lobato's ten must-read classics by African American authors, Peter Dimock's top ten books that rewrite history, five novels that explore the dark side in New York City, Peter Forbes's top ten books on color, Joyce Hackett's top ten musical novels, Sam Munson's six best stoner novels, and John Mullan's list of ten of the best nameless protagonists in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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