Saints on Columbus

Unburied secrets from 1492 haunt the world of a Nuyorican preteen on a quest to reinvent home and rewrite history. 

Prof. Konje's and Prof. De Herbert's mystical Dream Books offer purchasers the promise of a rich paradise through three-number combinations. Grandma swears by these books, even though they were written for the numbers game of the early twentieth century, and even though she's yet to hit the coveted jackpot that will deliver her family from life on the Avenue she curses for its drug lure. Life changes, though, when an uninvited guest to a seance leaves her with a mysterious pirate squatter. He has an insatiable appetite for Goya seasonings and her—romancing Grandma with every conceivable Sinatra vinyl in Fantasy Island settings that are both dreamy and horrific.

Forget Ghostbusters—cue in Nova, Grandma's quixotic preteen granddaughter with a Goonies-like love for the wormhole-plagued neighborhood Grandma abhors. Nova knows how conspiracy theories are behind everything, so she's come up with a plan that will take care of everything: the Blackbeard wannabe, getting into a smarty-pants high school (then college) and landing some serious New York City real estate. After all, Nova's a “Marvel comics mutant”. She's also the Rigelian Recorder 212, an extraterrestrial robot who records Earth's mightiest events. Plus, her old neighbor is schooling her in uncensored stories of life in the sixteenth century Caribbean, not to mention her best friend Marisol's ties to the Puerto Rican Independence movement. So: Nova's got this. The Dream Books offer something of their own: Konje's Relativity, a new law of (mystical) physics. That's all good news. Because the ghost of 1492 has some rather high demands on what Nova cherishes most—her neighborhood—commanding a family past, and a three-number-combo, that even Grandma never bet on.

Conspiracies, historical truth-bombs, coming-of-age angst—Saints on Columbus is comic book realism performed as a Bad Bunny halftime show, by a riotous girl of the Goonies Generation.

Publishing Oct 12, 2027

STEPHANIE NINA PITSIRILOS is a critically acclaimed prose and comics writer who rides the genre “comic book realism”. She is the recipient of the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize for “Jean”—Saints on Columbus in short story form—called “masterful” by Publishers Weekly. Her debut novel To Love Like Venus was a 2026 Kirkus Prize nominee. Stephanie’s works span from novels, collections, zines, and artists’ books, always bending spacetime. Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back is her sci-fi, sensual and literary collection of these multi-medium worlds. Stephanie is a Manhattanite of Nuyorico born and raised on the Upper West Side, with a heart that sails the Aegean sea.

Start by traveling through some musical wormholes to set the mood (and map out the journey): Spotify Playlist

(only publishes every few months)