Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer for The Millions . He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and has taught writing at several institutions of higher education, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University. Simon's work has appeared in The Atlantic , the Paris Review Daily , Aeon , Newsweek , the Washington Post , the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Times , among others. He is the author of several books, and his most recent titles include Relic , Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology from Abrams ; and Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost from Ig Publishing. In the summer of 2024, Melville House will release Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain . He has written about his hometown before in An Alternative History of Pittsburgh.