From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena -- dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.
This
stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of
remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming
and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects
offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image
of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories
and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled
their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce,
protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home
and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil
landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful
past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a
sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.
Review
"The Tsar of Love and Techno is an intricately structured and powerful collection [and] showcases Marra’s wit and his gift for unforgettable details....The Tsar of Love and Techno is the work of an elegant and generous writer." Bookpage
Review
"Remarkable…Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to
explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches
might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his
work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page —
of those whom history has erased." Francine Prose, Washington Post
Review
“[E]xtraordinary….Each story is a gem in itself. But the book is greater
than its parts, an almost unbearably moving exploration of the
importance of love, the pull of family, the uses and misuses of history,
and the need to reclaim the past by understanding who you really are
and what really happened....He starts this miracle of a book by showing us
how a system can erase the past, the truth, even its citizens. He ends
by demonstrating, through his courageous, flawed, deeply human
characters, how individual people can restore the things that have been
taken away. And if you’ve been worrying that you’ve lost your faith in
the emotionally transformative power of fiction – Mr. Marra will restore
that, too.” Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
About the Author
ANTHONY MARRA is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013),
which won the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural John Leonard
Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the Barnes and Noble
Discover Award, and appeared on over twenty year-end lists. Marra’s
novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a
finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and France’s Prix Medicis.
He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner
Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in
Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in
Oakland, California. His story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno, is forthcoming from Hogarth (Fall 2015). Visit http://anthonymarra.net/