Mercury Pictures Presents

Mercury Pictures Presents - Paperback

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Mercury Pictures Presents
  • Mercury Pictures Presents
Mercury Pictures Presents - Paperback

Mercury Pictures Presents - Paperback

by Anthony Marra
$18.00
$18.00

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Includes a behind-the-scenes conversation with bestselling novelist Amor Towles - The epic story of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive in 1940s Hollywood and fascist Europe, a timeless tale of love, deceit, and sacrifice--and a perfect book club pick--from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

"A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that's a true joy to read."--Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

"A gorgeous book . . . sublime."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate--and her own.

Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life's bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles."
ISBN9780451495211
Author Anthony Marra
PublisherHogarth Press
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedJune 2023
LanguageENG- English
Pages448
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Historical Fiction Literary

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More by Anthony Marra

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Paperback

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Paperback

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About Anthony Marra

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/

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